USA: Book critising Israeli Lobby is released in the U.S.

A book slamming the pro-Israeli lobby accusing it of influencing U.S. policies in the Middle East entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" is released in the United States, but Israel's supporters are not mounting a high profile campaign to discredit the book for fear of giving it more publicity. "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", a new book which has recently hit bookshelves across America, is causing a stir for its open criticism of the pro-Israel lobby. The book's two authors; John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University originally wrote an article about the influence of the Israeli lobby on American foreign policy. Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the U.S. publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece. The article drew criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel. But the Mearsheimer and Walt did not back down and the authors expanded their thesis into a book which became "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." A recent book signing in Washington D.C. attracted hundreds with many praising the authors for their work. Mearsheimer and Walt say they were not totally surprised by the reaction their work has generated. Their book supports Israel's right to exist but makes the argument that the powerful Israel lobby, known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has a very strong impact on American policy to the detriment of both American and Israeli interests. "Our aid should not be unconditional. Our aid should be conditional. Steve and I go to great lengths to say that the United States should support the existence of the state of Israel. We are not talking about abandoning Israel. But we should support an Israel that exists inside the 1967 borders with a few minor modifications for sure but mainly an Israel that exists within those 1967 borders. The United States should not support an expansionist Israel," Mearsheimer said in an interview with Reuters. The authors said that initially, in 2005, they were branded as being antisemitic but claim that this time, the response has been less ferocious. Walt said that one of the aims of the book is to hopefully trigger a good, healthy debate about Israel and U.S. foreign policy. He says he hopes it will no longer be such a "taboo" topic. "If we can foster an environment where more people talk openly about this, where they don't get smeared when they do, when they don't have their careers jeopardized because they have become critical of it, that's going to be good for American foreign policy,aswe have better policies when we debate them openly and it's ultimately going to be good for Israel and good for the rest of the world as well," Walt told Reuters. "Now that the Cold War is over, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States," wrote Mearsheimer and Walt . "Yet no aspiring politician is going to say so in public or even raise the possibility." The authors also claim that the Israeli lobby was responsible for shutting down talks with Syria and with moderates in Iran. They also claim the lobby prevented the United States from condemning Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon and from pushing the Israelis hard enough to come to an agreement with the Palestinians. "And today you have a situation where presidents are extremely reluctant to take on the lobby, and presidential candidates as we are seeing now in the run up to the 2008 election are unwilling to criticize Israel and indeed go to great lengths to compete among themselves to show their allegiance to Israel. So we have a situation now where the lobby has great influence on how almost all politicians of any national prominence think and talk about Israel," Mearsheimer said. AIPAC is an American special interest group that lobbies the United States Congress and the White House in favour of maintaining very close U.S.-Israel ties. AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association. The AIPAC members are all U.S. citizens and the group receives no funding from the Israeli government. The annual AIPAC conferences in Washington attract a Who's Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.

ITN Source | September 10, 2007

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