The Israeli lobby and the neoconservatives are beating the drums for war with Iran. I hope the president is not that dangerously stupid. The betting on whether he is that stupid is about even.

The neocons - who, being self-centered, seemingly have no concept of human nature - are advancing the premise that a military attack on Iran will cause the people to lose faith in their government and result in regime change.

A military attack on Iran will have the opposite effect. The people will rally to their government, and any hope of regime change will be dead. That people will rally around their existing leaders in the face of an attack by a foreign power is as certain as sunrise. Neither Israel nor the U.S. could do a greater favor for the ruling mullahs and Iran's president than to launch an attack. It would cement their hold on power.

The neocons' fallacious premise has already been disproved. In the first Gulf War, the first Bush administration confidently incited the Shiites and the Kurds to rebel after Saddam Hussein's forces were expelled from Kuwait. The administration thought that Saddam, embarrassed by a crushing military defeat, would fall from power in Iraq easily. Instead, he rallied his forces and crushed both the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north. Oops.

In the first place, it is not embarrassing for a Third World country with obsolete equipment to be defeated by the world's No. 1 military superpower. In the second place, the Sunnis, however much they might have disliked Saddam, disliked even more the thought of being ruled by Kurds or Shiites. In the third place, by President George H.W. Bush's decision to not go to Baghdad, Saddam could say he duked it out with the world's superpower and was still standing after the fight. That, in most eyes, could be counted as a victory.

Some months ago, an Iranian human-rights advocate pleaded with the current Bush administration to cease its rhetorical attacks on the Iranian government. She said, quite accurately, that such attacks make life impossible for Iranian reformers. Needless to say, the blockheads in Washington ignored her.

What did we do when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked? We rallied behind George W. Bush - Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. That's the natural reaction of normal human beings, and the Iranians are normal human beings. Attack their country and they will rally round the flag.

The Iranians still insist they are not seeking nuclear weapons, and there's not a scrap of evidence to contradict that claim. They still adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They have often called for a nuclear-free Middle East.

Once again, the dead roach in America's salad is Israel. The U.S. hypocritically opposes a nuclear-free Middle East because Israel has nuclear weapons. We hypocritically claim the Iranians are in violation of international law when, in fact, it is Israel that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses international inspections. Given our craven obedience to Israel, we have exactly zero credibility in the Arab and Muslim world.

As I have said before, I don't care if the Iranians do develop nuclear weapons. My whole adult life was lived with 30,000 Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at me. I can certainly live with the six or seven Iran might be able to scrape together in the next five to 10 years. In the meantime, the U.S. government should kick the Israeli lobby out of the country and support Iran and the Arab League in pushing for a nuclear-free Middle East.

The Israeli lobby pushing America to fight yet another war for Israel reminds me of what the French ambassador to Great Britain said at a party: "Why does the world allow this (expletive deleted) little country to cause so much trouble?"

Why indeed? You should ask your politicians that question.

This somewhat hysterical response is regrettable. In spite of its provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious. But it makes two distinct and important claims. The first is that uncritical support for Israel across the decades has not served America's best interests. This is an assertion that can be debated on its merits. The authors' second claim is more controversial: American foreign policy choices, they write, have for years been distorted by one domestic pressure group, the "Israel Lobby."

Some would prefer, when explaining American actions overseas, to point a finger at the domestic "energy lobby." Others might blame the influence of Wilsonian idealism, or imperial practices left over from the cold war. But that a powerful Israel lobby exists could hardly be denied by anyone who knows how Washington works. Its core is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its penumbra a variety of national Jewish organizations.

Does the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course - that is one of its goals. And it has been rather successful: Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid and American responses to Israeli behavior have been overwhelmingly uncritical or supportive.

But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment. Prominent Israeli leaders and their American supporters pressed very hard for the invasion of Iraq; but the United States would probably be in Iraq today even if there had been no Israel lobby. Is Israel, in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states?" I think it is; but that too is an issue for legitimate debate.

The essay and the issues it raises for American foreign policy have been prominently dissected and discussed overseas. In America, however, it's been another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media. Why? There are several plausible explanations. One is that a relatively obscure academic paper is of little concern to general-interest readers. Another is that claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original - and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in "lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their choices.

Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a "Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.

The end result - a failure to consider a major issue in public policy - is a great pity. So what, you may ask, if Europeans debate this subject with such enthusiasm? Isn't Europe a hotbed of anti-Zionists (read anti-Semites) who will always relish the chance to attack Israel and her American friend? But it was David Aaronovitch, a Times of London columnist who, in the course of criticizing Mearsheimer and Walt, nonetheless conceded that "I sympathize with their desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in the U.S. to understand the plight of the Palestinians."

And it was the German writer Christoph Bertram, a longstanding friend of America in a country where every public figure takes extraordinary care to tread carefully in such matters, who wrote in Die Zeit that "it is rare to find scholars with the desire and the courage to break taboos."

How are we to explain the fact that it is in Israel itself that the uncomfortable issues raised by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have been most thoroughly aired? It was an Israeli columnist in the liberal daily Haaretz who described the American foreign policy advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith as "walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments ...and Israeli interests." It was Israel's impeccably conservative Jerusalem Post that described Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, as "devoutly pro-Israel." Are we to accuse Israelis, too, of "anti-Zionism"?

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

Looking back, we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as the end of an era that began in the wake of the 1967 war, a period during which American alignment with Israel was shaped by two imperatives: cold-war strategic calculations and a new-found domestic sensitivity to the memory of the Holocaust and the debt owed to its victims and survivors.

For the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East - and its enduring implications for our standing there - has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

Tony Judt is the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author of "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945."

Kadima emerged as the biggest party in last month's election, and Sharon's successor Olmert, who will lead the new coalition government once the usual deals are struck, imagines that he can then carry out Sharon's grand plan.

After all, he has President Bush's letter of last year to Sharon that drastically changed US policy, declaring that Israel could not be expected to return to its pre-1967 borders "in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres".

Since the US is the world's sole superpower, surely it can make everybody else accept that outcome, too.

Just get it all done in the next 32 months, as Yoram Turbowicz pointed out, before Bush leaves office at the end of 2008.

One of Turbowicz's assumptions is dead right: Israel cannot expect to have Washington's support for expanding its borders in such a dramatic way from any subsequent administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

But Turbowicz is dead wrong in assuming that US support will be enough to make the change in Israel's borders legal, permanent, and widely accepted.

The world does not work like that, and even if the US's power were as great as Olmert seems to think it is, Washington could not make other countries accept such a gross breach of international law.

The new international law, written into the United Nations Charter, states that territorial changes imposed by force will not be recognised by UN members.

Full stop.

It's about taking the profit out of war and thereby reducing the temptation to go to war, and over 60 years it is the one UN rule that has almost never been broken.

The US State Department knows the law and it applies it.

It is possible - though unlikely - that the Bush administration might yet browbeat the State Department into "recognising" not only Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem but the far greater expansion of Israel's borders that Olmert now has in mind.

But it is simply inconceivable that President Bush could persuade other countries to accept such a gross violation of international law.

He cannot deliver; the deadline is meaningless. Olmert's government can build walls, dig ditches, move settlers around, proclaim that Israel's eternal borders are now some distance to the east of where they were last week, maybe even get the Bush administration to agree to the change, but none of it will have any legal force.

The whole exercise will take up enormous amounts of time, effort and newsprint over the next few years, but it is in the end only a charade.