The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, By John J Mearsheimer & Stephen M Walt

The race for the US presidency is well under way, and candidates for the Republican and Democratic nominations are criss-crossing the country, arguing about everything from gay marriage and immigration to Iraq. But, above all, they are raising money by the bucketful. The 2008 election promises to be the most expensive in American history. In order to be taken seriously a candidate will need to have raised $100m by the end of 2007, according to the head of the Federal Election Commission. These vast amounts are needed to get a message to the American people and then to hold its attention. However well a candidate is doing at the hustings, once the funding dries up, they quickly fade into obscurity.

Some topics are too hot even for presidential candidates to handle. Gun control is one, attacking Israel another. On the latter subject, all the serious candidates speak as one. Since the beginning of 2007, they have been proclaiming their personal commitment to the country, while making clear that once elected they will defend its interests under any circumstances.

America's Middle East policy is a disaster, but the influence of pro-Israeli activists is something no candidate is prepared to tackle. Although young soldiers die almost every day in Iraq and the US spends billions of dollars a week on a war its people bitterly oppose, the role played by supporters of Israel is never addressed by presidential hopefuls. Why is Israel, alone in the world, deferred to by US politicians, even when this cuts across American strategic interests?

That is the question that two distinguished academics, John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, set out to answer over a year and a half ago in an article commissioned by the Atlantic magazine. Their piece, which laid out the remarkable level of financial and political support the US provides to Israel and argued that it could not be justified on strategic or moral grounds, was spiked without explanation. The authors blamed the power of what they call the "Israel lobby" – a loose coalition of individuals and groups that influence US policy in ways that benefit Israel – for the state of affairs. They maintain that the lobby – far more hawkish than Jewish opinion in the US – shapes policy towards the Palestinian tragedy, goaded the US into invading Iraq, and is engineering further confrontation with Syria and Iran.

No other US publisher could be found and, when the piece appeared in the London Review of Books last year, it prompted a firestorm of criticism. Some of the biggest guns of the print media opened up on them. The authors were castigated as anti-Semites and accused of misrepresentation. But many agreed with their central point: that an examination of the taboo subject of Israel was long overdue.

Their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, goes into forensic detail on the lobby, and also examines the too-often overlooked role of Christian Zionism. It details Israel's harsh treatment of the Palestinians and the failure of peace talks. Conventional wisdom in the US invariably blames this on the Palestinians, further blunting any criticism of Israeli actions.

Despite the controversy, the negative reviews and cancellations of book signings, The Israel Lobby has rapidly ascended the US bestseller lists. It was at No 5 in the Los Angeles Times and 12 in The New York Times last weekend. The subject remains radioactive for presidential hopefuls. Last week Barack Obama was introduced in Iowa by the foreign policy expert Zbigniew Brzezinski. Suddenly the candidate found himself attacked by pro-Israel activists. He had made "a terrible mistake" in associating his campaign with Brzezinski, national security adviser for Jimmy Carter, who wrote a favourable review of The Israel Lobby.

Obama rapidly distanced himself from the controversy. His campaign said "the idea that supporters of Israel have somehow distorted US foreign policy, or that they are responsible for the débâcle in Iraq, is just wrong. And Obama's positions on Middle East affairs are, like his main rivals'... firmly in favour of Israel's aggressive security policy." Whew.

As the mud flies, some bookshops strive to mitigate criticism for even selling the book. Borders bookshop in Georgetown, Washington DC stacks it side by side with a tract by Abe Foxman. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the myth of Jewish control sets out to debunk "the anti-Semitic canards that the American Jewish community stifles free speech, has divided loyalties and is responsible for pushing the US into war in Iraq".

The core of the Mearsheimer/Walt argument is that lobbies exist. But while Cuban Americans, Irish Americans, Armenian Americans and Indian Americans have all managed to skew US foreign policy in their favour, "no ethnic lobby has diverted that policy as far" from the national interest. Moreover, the political agenda of the Israel lobby defines it, and "not the religious or ethnic identity of those pushing it," they say.

Thus we find Vice President Dick Cheney, who once wanted an oil deal with Iran, is now behind the bellicose White House policy. The lobby, say the authors, is more in line with the right-wing Likud party in Israel and can even outdo the Israeli government in its extremism. At its core, it is comprised of think tanks, action committees, neo-conservatives, Christian Zionists and academics. They are not always on the same page, but in a world filled with hateful terrorists whose only aim is to destroy the US and its allies, they all cling to an ideology of American exceptionalism: the belief that the US and its friends should not be bound by international law except where it serves their interests.

Leonard Doyle is Washington correspondent of 'The Independent'

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