WASHINGTON - Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is removing its logo from a paper about the "Israel lobby" that was co-authored by its academic dean.

The new version of the paper also has a more prominent disclaimer warning that the paper's views belong only to its authors.

The changes appear to be a sign that the university is distancing itself from the document in the face of a furor from faculty members, Jewish leaders, and a congressman who say it fails to meet academic standards and promotes anti-Semitic myths.

The paper charges that the United States has willingly set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel. In addition the study accuses the pro-Israeli lobby, particularly AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee - of manipulating the U.S. media, policing academia and silencing critics of Israel by labeling them as anti-Semitic. The study also examines the role played by pro-Israeli neo-conservatives in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of iraq.

The authors of the study, Stephen Walt, a dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer of University of Chicago are now themselves being accused of anti-Semitism.

In Washington, Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel of New York described the professors as "dishonest so-called intellectuals" and "anti-Semites." Harvard professor, Ruth Wisse called for the paper to be withdrawn. Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz described the study as trash that could have been written by Neo-Nazi David Duke. The New York Sun reported Harvard has received several calls from 'pro-Israel donors' expressing concern about the paper. Harvard has already taken steps to distance itself from the report. Earlier this week it removed the logo of the Kennedy School of Government from the paper and added a new disclaimer to the study. The 81-page report was originally published on Harvard's website and an edited version appeared in the London Review of Books. The controversy comes less than a year after Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz attempted to block the publication of Norman Finkelstein's book "Beyond Chutzpah: On The Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History."

The tone of the report is harsh. It is jarring for a self-critical Israeli, too. It lacks finesse and nuance when it looks at the alphabet soup of the American-Jewish organizational world and how the Lobby interacts with both the Israeli establishment and the wider right-wing echo chamber.

Their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

The bottom line might read as follows: that defending the occupation has done to the American pro-Israel community what living as an occupier has done to Israel - muddied both its moral compass and its rational self-interest compass.

The paper argues that U.S. support for Israel makes the war on terror more difficult:

Israel is in fact a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to del with rogue states... The United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.

The two professors also claim that the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., particularly the American Israel Public Afairs Committee (AIPAC) "manipulates the media" and "polices academia" in order to make sure the U.S. maintains a pro-Israel stance. They also assert that AIPAC regularly employs the claim of anti-Semitism as "the great silencer" to staunch any criticism of Israel.

And of course, it is claimed that pro-Israel officials early on in the Bush administration, who just happen to be Jewish – Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser – were behind the push for war in Iraq within the Bush Administration and the pro-Israel lobby worked Congress and the public towards the same end.

A look at the document shows it to be replete with enough factual errors as to make it fundamentally a work of fiction. And the "analysis" of events and conclusions offered end up being largely assertions about things the authors don't like. Indeed, no less an authority than David Duke, while hailing the study's circulation, offered the critique that it generally reiterated what he and his anti-Jewish colleagues have been saying for years.

The prospect of American ports being run by an Arab company ignited a firestorm in the blogosphere -- and the mainstream media and Congress. Now two of America's leading political scientists allege that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is being skewed away from U.S. national interests by a "loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." You'd imagine this would provoke, at the very least, a strong reaction.

So far, the response to The Israel Lobby [hereafter TIL], by John J. Mearsheimer (professor of political science, University of Chicago) and Stephen M. Walt (academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard), has been predictable scorn from the Pro-Israel Right (typified by Power Line and The American Thinker), with little more than murmurings from the Left (such as these postings out in the quiet backwaters of Daily Kos and TPM Cafe).

Even while leftwing bloggers seem hesitant to discuss the issues raised here, the noteworthiness of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper is evident in mainstream media coverage from UPI and Christian Science Monitor. And at Harvard, law professor, Alan M. Dershowitz (identified in TIL as an "apologist" for Israel) is ready to "debate" against Mearsheimer and Walt who he describes as "liars" and "bigots," while Walt's colleague Marvin Kalb knows how to cut an academic to the quick -- accuse him of engaging in second-rate journalism.

In its opening paragraphs TIL asserts:
Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of the other country -- in this case, Israel -- are essentially identical.
There have been times when such a claim would not garner much attention from domestically preoccupied Americans, but right now you'd have to be comatose not to recognize the grave implications as America and Israel speak with one voice on the threat from Iran.

Only yesterday, President Bush confirmed that the U.S. will use military force to defend Israel from Iranian threats, yet neither the administration nor Congress acknowledge that Israel's own nuclear arsenal, its occupation and colonization of Palestinian territories, or its treatment of its own Arab citizens, are critical factors exacerbating Middle East tensions.

It has thus never been more vital to open up debate on where U.S. and Israeli interests truly intersect and where they do not, yet so far the message from the Left is, we'd rather not talk about this sensitive issue.

To understand why the American Left is now largely mute on this subject, I recommend reading The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions, by Jeffrey Blankfort. His article, published in May, 2003, begins:
It was 1991 and Noam Chomsky had just finished a lecture in Berkeley on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was taking questions from the audience. An Arab-American asked him to explain his position regarding the influence of America's Israel lobby.

Chomsky replied that its reputation was generally exaggerated and, like other lobbies, it only appears to be powerful when its position lines up with that of the "elites" who determine policy in Washington. Earlier in the evening, he had asserted that Israel received support from the United States as a reward for the services it provides as the U.S.'s "cop-on-the-beat" in the Middle East.

Chomsky's response drew a warm round of applause from members of the audience who were no doubt pleased to have American Jews absolved from any blame for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, then in the fourth year of their first Intifada.
Blankfort then points out that:
What is noteworthy is that Chomsky's explanation for the financial and political support that the U.S. has provided Israel over the years is shared by what is generically known as the Israel lobby, and almost no one else.

Well, not quite "almost no one." Among the exceptions are the overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress and the mainstream media and, what is equally noteworthy, virtually the entire American Left, both ideological and idealistic, including the organizations ostensibly in the forefront of the fight for Palestinian rights.

That there is a meeting of the minds on this issue between supporters of Israel and the Left may help explain why the Palestine support movement within the United States has been an utter failure.
A new campaign to silence debate about the Israel Lobby is already following a predictable course. Efforts are being made to marginalize the issue by drawing attention to the fact that TIL has received praise from white supremicist David Duke along with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Nevertheless, Mearsheimer and Walt's effort to push the question of the Lobby's influence into mainstream political discourse is only one of several recent attempts.

One such came from Michael Massing, writing in The Nation, in 2002. Several more came from Michael Lind, writing in The Prospect in April 2002, Newsweek the same month, and again The Prospect in October 2002.

If the participation of the Dean of the Kennedy School of Government can't open up and legitimize this debate, it's hard to imagine what it might take to stir faint-hearted liberals into action -- but this is no time to remain silent.

In recent years, the slogan, "What did you do in the war?", has been used to good effect by many antiwar campaigners, yet as the U.S. and Israel continue gearing up to take on Iran, how many of those same campaigners if asked, "What did you do to challenge the influence of the Israel Lobby?" would now have nothing to say?

Call it the Belfer Declaration. It may not be much in and of itself, but if it turns out to be the start of an honest investigation into what is happening at the Kennedy School and at Harvard, it will be an important step indeed. Nor was it the only step in recent days. On Monday, Marvin Kalb of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, who we had feared was too reticent, issued a blunt statement making clear Dean Walt's paper isn't up to the Kennedy School's standards for scholarship, a statement that was all the more courageous for the fact that the Shorenstein Center is part of the Kennedy School at which Dean Walt presides. Alan Dershowitz of the Law School and Ruth Wisse of Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences have shown similar forthrightness, as has Mortimer Zuckerman, who is a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and who funds the Zuckerman Fellows at the Kennedy School. He voiced his own horror at Dean Walt's demagoguery.

Another donor who is on the spot is Leslie Wexner, the Ohio-based billionaire whose empire includes the Victoria's Secret chain. If this editorial weren't headlined "The Belfer Declaration" it might have been headlined "Where's Wexner?" For Mr. Wexner is a member of the Kennedy School visiting committee, a formal oversight body, and he funds fellowships for up to ten Israeli students a year at the Kennedy School. If he wants to send Israelis to a school where the academic dean asserts that "Viewed objectively, Israel's past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians," he could save himself some money and simply bus the Israeli graduate students over to Ramallah to attend Bir Zeit University, which is dominated by Hamas. Unlike Mr. Zuckerman, however, Mr. Wexner hasn't come forth with a public statement.

Also on the spot at the moment are members of Congress, which the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international relations has said is subject to the "stranglehold" of the "Israel Lobby." Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat who represents the Bronx and who was accused in the dean's paper of acting on the lobby's behalf in pursuing a free Lebanon and Syria, rose to the occasion, denouncing the paper as "anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel." But where is Senator Kennedy, the Democrat of Massachusetts for whose brother the late president the Kennedy School of Government is named? No profile in courage from him. He's been declining to comment on the matter for days, since we first asked him about it last week. And to judge from his remarks on the war in Iraq in recent months, he may already be lost to the cause of democracy and American ideals in the Middle East.

It's enough to make one wonder whether Harvard just ought to change the name to the Joseph P. Kennedy School of Government, after the 35th president's father, who, as FDR's envoy in London, plumped for appeasing Hitler. It is certainly true that the more one looks into the matter, the more the problems at the Kennedy School appear to reach well beyond a logo on one working paper or even one daffy dean with an exaggerated view of the influence of Jewish influence in Washington. There were warnings, including an article issued in May 2005 in the student newspaper at the Kennedy School, the Citizen. Its writer, Robert Berman, said that the school's Middle East Initiative "has been sponsoring and promoting numerous events at KSG that are highly biased, factually inaccurate, and inflammatory." He noted that the initiative's director, Hilary Rantisi, was listed as a participant on a panel organized by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee to "discuss" the decision to divest from Israel.

Ms. Rantisi is quoted in a press release from Dubai welcoming the minister of finance of the United Arab Emirates, Khalfan Bin khirbash, to a Kennedy School advisory committee. If America doesn't trust the UAE - a nation that Israelis are formally banned from entering - to operate its ports, why should its government officials be trusted to advise Harvard's Kennedy School? The Kennedy School is running an executive education program for UAE officials; the school's Web site says "the Kennedy School has developed a relationship with the federal government of the United Arab Emirates to train its mid and senior level officials on issues of innovation, leadership, efficiency, and effectiveness in the public sector." What's the Kennedy School doing, teaching UAE bureaucrats to be more efficient in barring Israeli passport holders from entering their country? Where are Senators Clinton and Schumer and the rest of the anti-Dubai crowd?

Ms. Rantisi, who, bear in mind, is the director of the Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative, is co-editor of a book, "Our Story: The Palestinians," published under the auspices of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Sabeel, according to the Non-Governmental Organizations Monitor of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, "is active in promoting an extreme anti-Israel agenda." It further notes that Sabeel, where Ms. Rantisi used to work, "employs classical antisemitic theological themes," citing a Jews-Killed-Jesus-type message that the organization issued for Easter, saying, "It seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians operating around him. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily."

In other words, the problem at the Kennedy School extends far beyond the Belfer professor. It will require a sustained effort by Harvard's donors, students, alumni and faculty to turn this situation around. Columbia University has become known derisively as Bir Zeit on the Hudson. For a while it looked like Harvard might avoid a Columbia-scale scandal, partly because Lawrence Summers chose early in his tenure as president of Harvard to confront actions that he stated were anti-Semitic if not in intent then at least in effect. Since then, of course, Mr. Summers has been driven from office, at least partly, we believe, in retribution for that stand, and today it must be said that the outcome of the struggle at Harvard is by no means assured. If those like the Belfers, Mr. Wexner, Senators Kennedy and Schumer, and scores of others with roots or a stake at Harvard aren't careful, the Kennedy School will become known as Bir Zeit on the Charles.

Almost 40 years ago, in 1967, Dr. King spoke in this very place about the need to speak up against a great purveyor of violence: his own government. He said, "If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam...So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land."
Dr. King also said that he was speaking on behalf "of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries."

"I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."

How those words, sadly, have so much meaning for us today.

Those of us who stand opposed to the war in Iraq do so as patriotic people who love our country and our communities but, because it is our country, we demand that it live up to high moral standards of peace, justice, democracy and human rights.

We speak and stand up and oppose the war in Iraq for the same reason that we speak and stand up and say the occupation of the Palestinian people is wrong, morally and legally, and must end with a negotiated, just, and peaceful solution between the lawfully elected governments of the Palestinian people and Israel.

To be honest, I don't think most Jews -- and certainly this is true of most Americans -- understand the brutality of the occupation, the violations of international law and our role in perpetuating that occupation. Most Jews have never been to the area and so they either have no idea what goes on or choose to ignore the awful reality. Their perceptions are framed by the MSM and pandering politicians.
If you raise a criticism of Israel or our country's policy towards the conflict, you immediately are targeted, within the Jewish community, as being either disloyal (if you are Jewish) or anti-Semitic (if you are not Jewish). This is nonsense and has got to stop.

In fact, those politicians who pander to our worst instincts of fear and hatred, who praise policies that violate international law, they are the ones who are hurting Israel's long-term security and the security of all the people in the area.

So, let me state clearly: I believe unequivocally in a secure, prosperous Israel. But I also believe with the same passion that the occupation is draining the moral and economic strength of Israel and that there will only be a just peace agreement when a Palestinian state -- a strong, vibrant, prosperous, independent state, able to provide jobs and a good life for its people -- thrives alongside Israel.

Taking away the liberty, the humanity and the dignity of the Palestinian people takes away from the security from Israel. Targeting civilians, killing innocent men, women and children is evil -- no matter who is doing it. Killing civilians is a "grave breach" of international humanitarian law. Whatever the circumstances, such acts are unjustifiable. We have to end the violence on both sides and support the peacemakers in both Israel and among the Palestinian people.

Opposition to the occupation is showing enormous love for Israel and for the Palestinian people. For the sake of Israel and for the sake of all people in that region who are fed up with three decades of war and occupation, we have to have an honest, open discussion.

There is a physical embodiment of the occupation that we must speak up against now: the separation barrier that is being built in the occupied territories, slicing through Palestinian communities, with the support of the U.S. government. Yes, Israel has a right to protect it citizens. But last night I asked:

How does peace come one day closer when we do not speak out against a wall that not only violates international law but, more important, embitters thousands of people for generations to come because it cuts off neighborhoods, separates families from each other, farmers from their land, the sick from hospitals, children from the schools and saps the economic vitality from an already impoverished people?
We have politicians who claim to be for the rule of law and stand before the Wall (as Hillary Clinton has done) and praise it -- even though it violates international law.

For us in the United States, the question becomes what is our government's role in perpetuating this conflict. As I said:

For too long, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, our government has had a counterproductive, one-sided policy that too often ignores democracy, human rights, and respect for international law.
Let's get this debate going. Begin to raise it among your friends and do so with the same love and commitment that you do for our country that leads you to vigorously oppose the Iraq war.

As Dr. King said in 1967, "Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now."

Jonathan Tasini is running for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in New York. For the past 25 years, Jonathan has been a union leader and organizer, a social activist, and a commentator and writer on work, labor and the economy.