"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard's John. F. Kennedy School of Government, has been the subject of numerous Op-Eds -- which generally have discredited it -- but has been all but ignored in the halls of Congress, its purported target.

Among other assertions, the paper suggests that the pro-Israel lobby -- and particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- have helped make the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, steered the country into the Iraq war, silenced debate on campuses and in the media, cost the United States friends throughout the world and corrupted U.S. moral standing.

The paper's "disagreement is not with America's pro-Israel lobby, but with the American people, who overwhelmingly support our relationship with Israel," said an official with a pro-Israel lobbying organization in Washington.

The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "an amateurish and biased critique of Israel, American Jews, and American policy."

Especially outrageous, some said, are the paper's insinuations that Jewish officials in government are somehow suspect.

"Not only are these charges wildly at variance with what I have personally witnessed in the Oval Office, but they also impugn the unstinting service to America's national security by public figures like Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and many others," David Gergen, Walt's fellow academic at the Kennedy School and a veteran of four administrations, wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Daily News.

One of the few positive reviews came from white supremacist David Duke, who said the authors reiterate points he has been making for years.

The controversy passed almost unnoticed on Capitol Hill. A statement from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) was typical of the few who bothered to pay attention to the paper, which Nadler called "little more than a repackaging of old conspiracy theories, historical revisionism, and a distorted understanding of U.S. strategic interest."

U.S. support of Israel was no mystery, Nadler said: "Israel is our only democratic and reliable ally in an extremely volatile and strategically important region. It is in our nation's best interests to maintain that alliance."

The authors anticipated silence, arguing that the Israel lobby is "manipulating the media" because "an open debate might cause Americans to question the level of support that they currently provide."

The problem with that theory is that some of the harshest criticism of the paper has come from individuals and groups who have long called for changes in how the United States deals with Israel. "It was a lot of warmed-over arguments that have been tossed about for years, brought together in a rather unscholarly fashion and presented as a Harvard document, clearly not deserving of the title," said Lewis Roth, assistant executive director of Americans for Peace Now, a group that has argued for increased U.S. pressure on Israel to achieve a peace agreement.

In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt have quietly removed the imprimatur of the Harvard and Kennedy schools that originally appeared on the paper. Walt holds the Robert and Renee Belfer professorship at the Kennedy School, and the paper appalled Robert Belfer, a major donor to Jewish causes, according to a report in the New York Sun. The chair is the equivalent of an academic dean at the Kennedy School, one of the most influential foreign policy centers in the United States.

"It read more like an opinion piece than serious research, and even as opinion it was so overreaching in some of its claims," Roth said. "It didn't have a lot of utility."

One of the harshest critics of the paper was Noam Chomsky, the political theorist who routinely excoriates the U.S.-Israel relationship. He ridiculed the paper's central "wag the dog" thesis, that the United States has "been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state."

Walt and Mearsheimer "have a highly selective use of evidence (and much of the evidence is assertion)," Chomsky wrote in an e-mail to followers. One example, he says, is how the paper cites Israel's arms sales to China as evidence that the Jewish state detracts from U.S. security interests.

"But they fail to mention that when the U.S. objected, Israel was compelled to back down: under Clinton in 2000, and again in 2005, in this case with the Washington neo-con regime going out of its way to humiliate Israel," Chomsky notes.

Walt and Mearsheimer see as interchangeable the pro-Israel lobby and the neo-conservatives who have developed Bush's foreign policy.

One of the paper's more curious conclusions is that "what sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness. But there is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy towards Israel."

If so, it begs the question of why Walt and Mearsheimer set out to write the paper. Mearsheimer did not return a call for comment.

In other areas, the paper gets facts wrong, for example when it says Israel wanted to sell its Lavie fighter aircraft to the United States, when it was strictly a domestic project.

According to the writers, "pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element."

Off the record, Jewish officials here reverse that equation, saying their support for the Iraq war was necessary in order to curry favor with a White House that was hell-bent on war. In fact, the adventure unsettled many Israeli and Jewish officials because of concerns that the principal beneficiary would be Iran.

"That really jumped out at me," Roth said. "Among nasty neighbors, Iran was clearly the greater threat."

Jewish groups and individuals at first were reluctant to react to a paper they saw as impugning their patriotism, but in time they could not resist. Detailed debunkings of Walt and Mearsheimer have proliferated.

Some of these, notably by fellow Harvard professors Ruth Wisse and Alan Dershowitz, have likened the writers to Duke -- a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan -- and other anti-Semites.

For some Jews, however, the criticism proved that despite the paper's flaws, it correctly identified a symptom afflicting discussion of Israel: a tendency to dismiss all criticism as anti-Semitism.

"Even if the paper is as bad as its critics say, that does not obviate the need to respond to the points it makes," said Eric Alterman, a media critic for The Nation. "So far, most of what I am seeing is mere character assassination of exactly the kind I, also, experience whenever I take up the issue. This leads me to conclude the point of most -- but not all -- of the criticism is to shut down debate because AIPAC partisans are wary of seeing their arguments and tactics subjected to scrutiny of any kind."

Soon after the publication of the article it was announced that Prof Walt would step down from his job as academic dean at the end of June. However, the Kennedy School and Prof Walt's colleagues said that the move had long been planned.

The Kennedy school removed its cover page from the online version of the article but said in a statement: "The only purpose of that removal was to end public confusion; it was not intended, contrary to some interpretations, to send any signal that the school was also 'distancing' itself from one of its senior professors."

"The University of Chicago and Harvard University have behaved admirably in difficult circumstances. We have had the full support of our respective institutions," Prof Mearsheimer said.

The article argues that the US has "been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies" to advance Israeli interests, largely as a result of pressure from Jewish American groups such as the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) allied to pro-Zionist Christian evangelists and influential Jewish neo-conservatives such as former Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. It argues their combined influence was critical in the decision to go to war in Iraq.

Writing in the online magazine, Slate, the British-born journalist Christopher Hitchens criticised the authors' "over-fondness for Jewish name-dropping" and argued that the first occasion the neo-conservatives had a significant influence on foreign policy was to press the Clinton administration to intervene on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.

No AIPAC officials would comment about the controversy on the record.

Yesterday Prof Mearsheimer said: "We went out of our way to say that the lobby is simply engaging in interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie."

A councilman in New York City, David Yassky, is eyeing the Brooklyn seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Major Owens. A state senator in Memphis, Steve Cohen, is seeking support for a bid to replace Rep. Harold Ford, who is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Majority Leader Bill Frist. Both Yassky and Cohen face crowded primary fights, with multiple black candidates potentially splitting the African American vote.

Josh Kraushaar, editor of noted political tip sheet House Race Hotline, called the New York and Tennessee races "unique" because "there are so many candidates" and neither state has rules mandating a runoff if no candidate earns a majority, so whoever gains the most votes wins. "With these districts' demographics, you could easily get the white vote and you've won the election," Kraushaar said. "In the past four or five election cycles, there hasn't been anything quite like this."

If successful, Yassky and Cohen would be resurrecting an older pattern. Until the mid-1990s, Jewish Democrats, including Stephen Solarz of New York, Herb Klein of New Jersey and William Lehman of Florida, represented significant numbers of minority voters. But starting in the early 1990s, many minority voters were packed into new districts where they constituted a majority. The strategy resulted in the election of more black and Latino representatives, sometimes at the expense of white Democratic office holders.

Martin Frost, a former Texas lawmaker who in the late 1990s served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for two election cycles, did not hold out much hope for the Jewish candidates. "It's difficult for an Anglo member to be elected in a district that has previously been represented by an African American - difficult, but not impossible," said Frost, who is Jewish, but represented a district in which about 26% of voters were black and 21% were Hispanic before Republicans redistricted him out of a seat.

"If he's running against an African American, the trend has been set," Frost added. "The African American community feels ownership of the district."

Yassky and Cohen - both liberals who have championed issues of special interest to minority voters, such as bolstering public education, increasing access to health care and housing, and restoring felons' voting rights - contend their records demonstrate that they'd be forceful and faithful advocates of the district's interests.

"The majority of voters [in the district] are African American. It's their seat and it will remain in their hands," Yassky, a one-time aide to Senator Charles Schumer, told the Forward. "Whoever gets the seat will work their heart out for these voters."

Cohen, a colorful 20-plus-year veteran of the Tennessee State Senate who 10 years ago ran for and lost the seat he is now seeking, said that he voted in favor of bills championed by African Americans "on which African Americans in the Senate sold out." "I've got a history," Cohen said. "There's not a Caucasian politician with as much strength in the African American community as I have." He recently told House Race Hotline that he wants to be "the first white member" of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Despite such outreach efforts, the two Jewish candidates are drawing criticism from those who view the districts as vehicles to send blacks to Washington.

Owens, the Brooklyn district's longtime congressman, recently called Yassky a "colonizer" for seeking to represent the district, which was carved out in 1967 to increase black representation, the New York Daily News reported.

The idea that the district belongs to the black community appears to be shared by some residents, if not with the vehemence that Owens exhibited.

Waldaba Stewart, a Caribbean American activist and former New York state senator, told the Forward that he has "no problem" with Yassky running because "any citizen of any group has a right to run." Even so, he said, "the district was created with the hope that it would reflect the majority of the population in that district, within the context of the attempt to increase minority representation. That was the district the Caribbean community fought for. We have no representative in Congress, even though we are 3 million in the New York area and 1 million in Brooklyn."

Owens's son Chris is among the five candidates seeking the seat, although local political observers consider a black state senator, Carl Andrews - a protégé of disgraced Brooklyn Democratic boss Clarence Norman - the frontrunner of the field. Two of the candidates are Caribbean American; Yassky is the only white. The district encompasses the mostly black neighborhood of Brownsville, immigrant-heavy East Flatbush, mostly white Park Slope, heavily Jewish Midwood and the mixed Caribbean-Hasidic neighborhood of Crown Heights. According to Owens's congressional Web site, 24% of his constituents are white, 57% are African American and 12% are Hispanic.

Crown Heights in particular has been the scene of black-Jewish tensions. In 1991, after a car in the motorcade of the Lubavitcher Rebbe killed a child, three days of rioting broke out in which one Hasidic man was killed by attackers. Yassky's campaign, however, has not stirred any animus on the street, locals said. "It's too early in the campaign," said Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, chairman of Crown Heights's Community Board 9. The primary takes place in September.

Yassky has one obvious advantage over his rivals: According to federal campaign records, he has $500,000 cash on hand for his bid - $140,000 more than his rivals combined. He has courted Jewish voters and donors, visiting, for example, the recent national conferences of the ultra-Orthodox group Agudath Israel of America and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The Tennessee district that Cohen is eying, the ninth, is made up of Memphis and its Shelby County suburbs, and is almost three-fifths black, according to Congressional Quarterly. As many as 15 people have declared candidacies or expressed interest in running for the seat, with the frontrunners being two black candidates: airline executive Nikki Tinker and Shelby County Commissioner Julian Bolton. Before Ford was elected, the seat was held by his father, Harold Ford Sr.

David Cocke, a longtime Memphis Democratic activist and former head of the Shelby County Democratic Party, said that Cohen is probably the best known of the Democrats running and could win if the field doesn't winnow itself. He said there could be some resentment among blacks if Cohen won, "whether it's justified under the circumstances or not."

"Harold Ford Sr.'s victory in 1974 was a landmark in the political life of African Americans in Shelby County," Cocke said. "That seat has been in the hands of Fords for 30 years. Lots of people take it for granted that the seat is an African American seat, not just a seat. It's the only African American seat in the state. With black population in the state equal to or greater than the 11% [represented by the seat], you could see how black people could think they could be disenfranchised."

"This is very much in keeping with what we've consistently said: that we would require an incoming government to, basically, respect existing agreements to follow the road map to recognize Israel as a state and to renounce all violence," Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said yesterday.

"To date, that has not happened. So, as a result, there will be no direct or indirect funding to the Palestinian Authority."

The announcement will mean the suspension of $7.3-million in aid.

That aid would have helped the Palestinian government replace housing, refurbish and manage an industrial park in Ramallah, and convene an international meeting of justice ministers. In addition, several other projects have come to an end and are not being extended or renewed.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar told Associated Press television he wasn't surprised by the decision. "The question is if the Canadian state is willing to starve the Palestinian people while the Israelis are committing big crimes against the Palestinian industry, the Palestinian society," Mr. Zahar said.

The newly installed Palestinian Information Minister, Youssef Rizka, called the Canadian action "hasty" and said it "shows obvious bias."

Mr. MacKay said the move to end financial assistance to the Hamas-led government does not mean that the Palestinian people would be neglected.

Canada spends roughly $25-million a year on development initiatives in the West Bank and Gaza and Mr. MacKay said some of those funds will continue to support humanitarian needs in the territory.

"We do intend to continue, to the best degree possible, to directly fund the Palestinian people through humanitarian aid and that is more so under the auspices of CIDA [Canadian International Development Agency]," he told reporters.

Canada's official dealings with the Palestinian Authority have been through the office of president Mahmoud Abbas, whose own political organization, Fatah, lost control of the legislative branch in the January election. Mr. MacKay said that line of communication will continue.

"We consider him to be a positive influence in the Palestinian government," he said.

The United States has unofficially cut funding to the Palestinian Authority since Hamas took office.

Frank Dimant, the Canadian vice-president of B'nai Brith, said the decision means that Canada has stood to its principles by refusing to do business with a terrorist entity whose avowed aim continues to be the destruction of the Jewish State.

But Hussein Amery, the president of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations, said it would have been much more productive to promote the peace process rather than cutting what is a small amount of money in the Canadian context.

"It's disappointing that Canada has chosen to be the first of the international actors to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority," Mr. Amery said. "It's also a bit perplexing and concerning that the government can so easily distinguish between humanitarian assistance and development assistances which may or may not benefit the Palestinian Authority."

The housing-project money would have repaired homes damaged by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, and the industrial park funds would have helped offset unemployment and promote the establishment of businesses, he said.

"Obviously, these are the kinds of projects that were targeted at benefiting the people as a whole," Mr. Amery said.

"It has jeopardized our position as an honest broker. And we were seen by both Palestinians and Israelis as the last honest broker. So now we're left to wonder who is going to play that role since Canada has clearly marked out its position here, ahead of even the United States."

While communication with Palestinian officials has been suspended, Prime Minster Stephen Harper took time yesterday to call newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has promised to set Israel's borders with Palestine by 2010 -- with or without Palestinian agreement.

"I spoke earlier today with Ehud Olmert to offer my congratulations on the victory of his Kadima party in yesterday's elections in Israel," Mr. Harper said in a statement.

"Canada and Israel enjoy solid bilateral relations and Mr. Olmert and I agreed to work together at expanding them even more. Canada remains a staunch supporter of peace in the Middle East and we will continue to work with Mr. Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas to reach that goal."

Both the New Democrats and the Liberals said yesterday that, rather than simply cutting $7.3-million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority, those funds should be redirected to humanitarian assistance in Palestinian territories.

"The government should, right away, commit itself to maintaining the $52-million in help," Stéphane Dion, the Liberal foreign affairs critic, said.

"The social problems [in the territories] are awful and, in fact, Canada should do more not less. So to cut $7-million would be a mistake."

Washington had seen nothing to change its mind about Hamas, Bolton said, describing it as a terrorist organization responsible for the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians and which has harmed Palestinians' aspirations for statehood.

The United States ordered its diplomats and contractors on Wednesday to cut off contacts with Palestinian ministries after the Hamas-led government was sworn in, two months after the militant Islamic group's landslide election victory.

In a further sign of how the United States aims to isolate Hamas, Bolton said Washington had decided to redefine the duties of U.S. Major-General Keith Dayton, whoe was appointed last November to oversee Israeli-Palestinian security coordination efforts.

Dayton had previously worked on such issues as Gaza border crossings and Palestinian security reforms but was now being asked to end all contact with Palestinian security forces reporting to any member of the Hamas cabinet, Bolton said.

The Security Council meeting came hours after the quartet of Middle East mediators -- the United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations -- noted with "grave concern" that Hamas had failed to respond to its January plea to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept past Palestinian international commitments.

Senior U.N. political aide Tuliameni Kalomoh told the council the new Palestinian government had shown "signs of evolution" in its hard-line stance but said it had to do more to ensure international support for the Palestinian peoples' aspirations for peace and statehood.

He also warned Israel that unilateral action in place of negotiated steps toward peace could make it even more difficult to convince the Palestinians to compromise.

The centrist Kadima party led by interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, which won Tuesday's election in Israel, has pledged to set Israel's final borders by 2010 with or without the agreement of its Palestinian neighbor.

Both Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have expressed a willingness to resume final status peace talks, however, and Kalomoh appealed to both sides to seriously explore a resumption of negotiations.

Growing links between the British and Israeli militaries have just resulted in one Israeli company, Elbit systems, receiving a £317 million contract from the Ministry of Defence. The MoD has trialled an Israeli-built anti-tank missile despite its use against civilians in the occupied territories. It also purchased 26,000 cluster shells from Israel in 2003 and 2004, some of which were used in the invasion of Iraq.

The British government has no mechanisms to monitor whether British firms violate human rights in the occupied territories. The construction company, Caterpillar, a US firm with a large British subsidiary, sells military bulldozers to Israel used to demolish 4,000 houses and which killed the peace activist, Rachel Corrie. At the same time, there is evidence that British companies have exported equipment used in the construction of Israel's 'security wall' inside Palestinian territory.

Britain's diplomatic stance towards Israel has also been striking. A major gain for the Sharon government has been Tony Blair's persistent line, shared with the US, that 'there is not going to be any successful negotiation or peace without an end to terrorism' first. Palestinian suicide bombings are unjustifiable acts of mass murder but, as Uri Avnery of the Israeli peace movement, Gush Shalom, has noted, this Blair line means that 'until the armed opposition to occupation stops, there can be no talk about ending the occupation'.

Blair's personal statements rarely condemn Israel outright but assert that 'both sides' are responsible for the violence. This ignores the fact that one of the actors is illegally occupying the territory of the other. British government statements, however, rarely even call for the occupation to end. At the same time, the British embassy in Tel Aviv describes Britain 'as a good friend of Israel' and its 'natural partner', while 'our two prime ministers are in regular contact and have a good working and personal relationship'.

London has also helped to maintain the fiction that Sharon's government supports the 'shared goal' of a viable Palestinian state, as Jack Straw recently told a Labour Friends of Israel event. Yet in a confidential document leaked to the Guardian last November, the British consulate in East Jerusalem wrote that Sharon's illegal building of settlements in East Jerusalem was designed to prevent it becoming the capital of any Palestinian state. Privately, then, even some British officials refute the government's public line.

Jack Straw's intense diplomacy to prevent Iran pursuing uranium enrichment compares to virtual silence on Israel's possession of over 100 nuclear warheads. Whitehall exerted huge pressure on EU members to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe; yet in response to a recent parliamentary question, the government again rejected applying EU sanctions against Israel. Instead, London acts as Israel's chief defender in Brussels by resisting calls to suspend the EU's trade and aid agreement, even though it requires 'respect for human rights'. Whitehall even backs a proposed EU action plan that would deepen political cooperation and economic relations with Israel. By contrast, Britain was key in securing EU agreement to ban the political wing of Hamas and place its leaders on a terrorist blacklist.

Foreign Office minister Lord Triesman told Parliament in December that 'we do not believe that Israel complies rigorously with international law' in continuing to build settlements and conducting targeting killings and house demolitions. The government has also provided (low-key) criticism of Israel's construction of the 'security fence' in Palestinian territory. Yet such occasional demarches are meaningless in light of other policies which help to protect Israel from greater international pressure to end the occupation.

Two formerly secret documents help explain British policy. A 1970 Foreign Office report called 'Future British policy toward the Arab/Israel Dispute' rejected both an openly pro-Israel and pro-Arab policy, the latter 'because of the pressure which the United States government undoubtedly exert… to keep us in line in any public pronouncements or negotiations on the dispute'. It also rejected 'active neutrality' since this would damage 'our world-wide relationship with the US'. Therefore, the Foreign Office argued for a 'low risk policy', involving 'private pressure upon the US to do all in their power to bring about a settlement'.

The second document, a Joint Intelligence Committee report from 1969, notes that 'rapid industrialisation' was occurring in Israel which was 'already a valuable trading partner with a considerable future potential in the industrial areas where we want to develop Britain as a major world-wide manufacturer and supplier'. This contrasted to the Arab world where, despite oil, 'recent developments appear to confirm that the prospects for profitable economic dealings with the Arab countries are at best static and could, over the long term, decline'.

Three decades later, Israel is Britain's third largest trading partner in the Middle East while the government describes Israel as 'a remarkable success story for British exporters', especially in high-tech industry. Appeasing Washington and prioritising profits are Whitehall's entrenched interests that need challenging if Britain is ever to support human rights in the region.