John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have now responded to the critics of their paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” with a robust, defiant book of the same title (2007, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 496 pages). Not only have they preserved many signal phrases from the original article, they’ve also retained much if not all of the most controversial evidence for their claims, including quotes from David Ben-Gurion and the Forward that they have been accused of plucking out of context. They’ve supplemented this material with a broad array of new examples, clarified vague concepts — including the definition of the so-called “Israel lobby” — and extended their discussion beyond the Iraq war to U.S. relations with Syria, Iran, and the 2006 war in Lebanon (and Gaza). The thrust remains the same: that U.S. policy in the Middle East is powerfully influenced by the “Israel lobby” in ways that are detrimental to the interests of both the U.S. and, quite often, Israel itself.

The authors emphasize repeatedly that they are not challenging Israel’s right to exist and that they believe the U.S. should come to Israel’s defense were its survival threatened. What they question is the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S., marked by the $3 billion (at least) that Israel receives annually from the U.S., under extraordinarily favorable terms, to subsidize its military.

Insofar as an individual or group works to bolster or defend this “special relationship,” they can be counted among the lobby’s ranks, according to The Israel Lobby. Groups that have long supported a two-state solution — and are thereby often at odds with the lobby’s hard-line elements — such as Americans for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum, are counted in. Even Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been consistently, uncompromisingly critical of U.S. military support for Israel, is not definitively counted out.

With such a definition, Mearsheimer and Walt seem intent on protecting themselves from charges of anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering. Yet they hardly serve their own argument by redefining the lobby as a majority of the American population! Their “lobby” now includes not only major American Jewish organizations but the Christian Right, the neoconservative movement, many mainstream Democrats — and the vast majority of American Jews. This will hardly help Mearsheimer and Walt defend themselves against accusations that they’re after the Jewish people as a whole.

Take the case of Dennis Ross, currently a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank spun out of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). When Republicans in Congress introduced the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which called for the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to an “undivided” Jerusalem, the Clinton administration, bent on securing an Arab-Israeli peace deal, was against it. The act passed overwhelmingly (with AIPAC’s support), and the Arab world was infuriated. Ross, at the time Clinton’s chief negotiator at Camp David, commented, “I wasn’t thrilled with the emphasis on moving the embassy.”

Ross has further insisted that “in the Clinton administration there wasn’t any hesitancy” about “forcing . . . the Netanyahu government to take the [Palestinian] issue head-on.” “Forcing,” however, didn’t include any threat to the “special relationship,” much less any full-bodied exercise of the obvious financial leverage that the U.S. wields over Israel. Therefore, despite his support for a two-state solution (which Mearsheimer and Walt also support) and his displeasure with the 1995 legislation, Ross is considered by the authors to belong to the “Israel lobby.”

Nevertheless, when analyzing the lobby’s influence, Mearsheimer and Walt focus most sharply on the neoconservatives and the conservative leadership of the major American Jewish organizations, who are more than simply ‘pro-Israel’ and generally favor a conservative, hard-line vision of the country and its role in the region. Their influence takes many forms, from lobbying the executive and legislative branches to trying to set parameters for public discussion of Israel — whether through (in Naomi Klein’s apt phrase) “those paid to think by those who make tanks” or by assiduous monitoring of the public debate.

No monitor has a higher profile than Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, who has written The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control (2007, Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages). Foxman’s book takes aim not only at Mearsheimer and Walt but also historian Tony Judt and former President Jimmy Carter.

Foxman manages to restrain himself from calling any of them anti-Semites, but repeatedly argues that their arguments are, “intentionally or not,” anti-Semitic. Mearsheimer and Walt, he writes, “have inaugurated a new era of anti-Jewish scapegoating ...” Their argument “has many of the elements that are familiar from the classic anti-Jewish conspiracy theories throughout history” and “embraces half a dozen of the common and poisonous assertions that anti-Semites have long peddled.” Their work “serves merely as an attractive package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs about Jews” held by “avowed anti-Semites.” Foxman reassures readers, “I don’t believe in guilt by association,” right after repeating The New York Sun’s scurrilous ‘association’ of Mearsheimer and Walt with David Duke.

As for Carter, the “primary effect” of his Peace Not Apartheid “will be to give comfort and support to bigots and opportunists whose chief goal is the destruction of a nation and its people.”

Briefly discussing the work of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Foxman asks, “Does Ritter explicitly say that American Jews who advocate a tough stance in regard to Iran’s nuclear ambitions are guilty of treason ...? Not ... in so many words.” Yet eight sentences later Foxman invokes “the Ritteresque strategy of blaming the Jews.”

These insinuations of anti-Semitism are clearly intended to place certain political arguments about the role of the so-called “Israel lobby” and Israel’s rule over the Palestinians beyond the pale of decent public discourse. Not only does this feed stereotypes about Jewish control over the media that Foxman so fervently desires to combat, but it also dangerously saps the potency of the charge of anti-Semitism, which should be reserved for the swastika painted on the synagogue, the Holocaust denier, or acts of actual discrimination, as a full-throated warning of danger among us. Genuine anti-Semitism doesn’t leave much room for doubt.

Foxman tries to deepen his analysis by debunking what he defines as the prevailing myths of anti-Semitism, eight statements that cast Israel and the Jews as scapegoats for the problems of the U.S. and the world. Some of these “myths” — such as, “U.S, support for Israel is disproportionate to Israel’s strategic importance” — don’t seem to be particularly widespread, and Foxman makes no effort to prove that they are. His use of a euphemistic term like “strategic,” moreover, seems like a trap set for those people who are opposed to U.S. military and oil-industry policies of domination in the Middle East. If such critics oppose Israel’s “disproportionate” military aid package (and the role of that aid in facilitating the occupation of Palestinian territories), they are vulnerable to charges of anti-Semitism.

Other “myths” that Foxman identifies — for example, that “powerful lobbies  ...  including the Israel lobby ... have virtually unchallenged power,” or that “leading Jewish-American organizations slavishly support Israel” — are certainly hyperbolic, but may be anti-Semitic only depending on the mythologizer’s intent. Another, that the “ADL and other ‘Jewish lobby’ groups push a hard-line, hawkish political point of view that doesn’t represent the mainstream of Jewish opinion in either Israel or the United States,” is clearly a debatable proposition. In any event, if these are today’s most damaging myths of anti-Semitism, we’ve come a long way from the blood libel.

For myth number eight, Foxman offers his own spin on Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis: “Jews have used their political power in the United States to ensure that Israeli interests inevitably prevail in the shaping of American foreign policy.” He then trots out the usual contrary examples (the 1981 sale of AWACS spy planes to Saudi Arabia, the 1991 battle over $10 billion in loan guarantees) to show that the lobby is unable to “ensure” that Israeli interests “inevitably” determine U.S. foreign policy. Case closed — except that nowhere in Mearsheimer and Walt’s argument does this caricature of the lobby’s role appear.

They allow that the lobby has lost some battles and won others. They do not argue that the lobby’s power ‘ensures’ Israeli interests, much less that they ‘inevitably’ prevail. But they do argue that the lobby is one of the most powerful on Capitol Hill, and that its use of that power to support hard-line policies has hurt both Israel’s and America’s genuine long-term interest of achieving sustainable peace and security.

Where their argument about the lobby’s influence gets most controversial is when they turn to the Iraq war, which they present as cooked up and served whole by the “Israel lobby.”

Certainly, in the months leading up to the invasion, many key Israeli leaders called for war. Mearsheimer and Walt again present a list of statements by Sharon, Netanyahu, Barak, and Peres, among others, egging on the Bush administration. However, given the Israeli leadership’s continuing emphasis on the threat to Israel posed by Iran (and its allies in Hezbollah and Hamas), it’s eminently plausible that the Israelis simply saw the train for Baghdad leaving the station and piled aboard.

Indeed, Mearsheimer and Walt state forthrightly that “Israel did not initiate the campaign for war against Iraq.” What’s important to them is not that Israel’s political leadership rallied behind the war, but that the lobby led the charge. They note that the ADL, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations all approved of (to varying degrees) the use of force, and that AIPAC’s executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun that “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of AIPAC’s chief successes in 2003.

Resolutions can be empty, however, and the significance of AIPAC’s lobbying will most likely remain obscure. None of this is enough to establish that without the “Israel lobby,” America would probably not be in Iraq today. What made the real difference was the neocons. Mearsheimer and Walt focus on the now doubly disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, convicted perjurer I. Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and David Wurmser (all but Bolton are Jewish).

Speaking to a B’nai Brith meeting, the Israeli ambassador to the UN jokingly dubbed Bolton “a secret member of Israel’s own team,” while former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made a similar assessment of Libby: “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.”

Days after the September 11th attacks, Wurmser co-wrote a memo suggesting “hitting” a “non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq.” More or less simultaneously, at a press conference at the American Enterprise Institute (where he was director of Middle East studies), Wurmser associated al Qaeda with Hussein’s Iraq and Arafat’s Palestinian Authority: “You are dealing with the same phenomenon that has to be dealt with decisively.”

Wurmser and Douglas Feith (a proponent of “greater Israel”) also played critical roles in the propaganda campaign by working to bypass traditional intelligence channels less favorable to their aims. By this time they had Bush’s approval, but without their efforts both within and without the administration several thousand Americans and untold thousands of Iraqis would be alive today.

Clearly, a hawkish approach to Israeli security was a priority for all these officials; whether that can be said of Wolfowitz is somewhat controversial. When Mearsheimer and Walt quoted the Forward declaring him “the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration,” the Forward’s editors pointed out this assessment came from an article that contradicted it and showed Wolfowitz to favor the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. Mearsheimer and Walt reinforce the ‘conventional wisdom’ about Wolfowitz, however, with a number of other items, including a quote echoing the “hard-liner” assessment from the Jerusalem Post — which named Wolfowitz its 2003 ‘Man of the Year’ — and his receipt of the 2002 Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award from the conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

It was Wolfowitz who first put Iraq on the Bush administration’s table four days after September 11th and lobbied hard for war. Libby was almost certainly crucial in convincing Dick Cheney to support the war (prior to September 11th, both Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were on record opposing a strike against Iraq), pressuring CIA analysts to ‘fix’ intelligence, and briefing Colin Powell in advance of his now thoroughly discredited presentation to the UN.

The chances that a memo urging the president to attack Iraq to protect Israel will ever surface are slim to none. What can be established is that the neocons were decisive in envisioning the war as a strategic option, selling it both to the Bush administration and to the American people, and that fulfilling their notion of Israel’s security needs was among their primary motivations.

“It is nice to believe that ‘we Americans’ really weren’t to blame” for the war in Iraq, Abraham Foxman writes. He’s right, and progressives must be cautious when gauging the lobby’s influence. In one of the more compelling responses to The Israel Lobby, Chris Toensing (editor of Middle East Report, where the essay appeared) and Mitchell Plitnick (director of education and policy at Jewish Voice for Peace and author of the indispensable blog MuzzleWatch, which tracks efforts to silence debate over Israel), question whether the neocons were truly the irreplaceable element in this equation. “The most serious fault,” they write, “lies in the professors’ conclusion — soothing in this day and age — that U.S. Middle East policy would become ‘more temperate’ were the influence of the lobby to be curtailed.”

While Mearsheimer and Walt concede that there was “a limited case” for Israel’s importance as a U.S. ally during the Cold War, they don’t believe this can explain the full extent of U.S. support, then or now. Plitnick and Toensing disagree. Citing then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson’s opposition to Eisenhower’s effort to compel the Israelis to withdraw from the Sinai in the wake of the 1956 war, they argue that Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 Six Day War confirmed Johnson’s “conviction that Israel was a useful Cold War asset.” Nixon and Kissinger then elevated Israel to the status of regional proxy alongside Saudi Arabia and the Shah’s Iran.

Israel’s usefulness to the U.S., Plitnick and Toensing argue, lay in destabilizing Arab nationalism and demonstrating to countries like Egypt and Syria that Soviet support wouldn’t get them very far. All four analysts agree that the ultimate goal was preventing any one country from gaining control over the region’s oil. This goal was enshrined in the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.” The document, drafted by Zalmay Khalilzad (on behalf of Libby, on behalf of Wolfowitz, on behalf of Cheney), was promptly disavowed by the elder President Bush’s White House when it was made public, only to be eventually reincarnated as the revolutionary 2002 National Security Strategy, which embraced preventive war as a legitimate strategic option. (Khalilzad is now U.S. ambassador to the UN.)

Mearsheimer and Walt are oddly conflicted, however, about how oil fits into the strategic calculus that led to the war in Iraq. They acknowledge oil as one of the U.S.’s three major strategic interests in the region (the others being discouraging nuclear proliferation and anti-American terrorism), but argue there is little evidence that oil corporations were lobbying for war. The map of Iraqi oil reserves unearthed in a recent Freedom of Information Act inquiry regarding Cheney’s energy task force offers provocative, if slim, evidence to the contrary.

Mearsheimer and Walt further note that the Saudis publicly opposed the war, yet Bob Woodward has reported that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah contacted Bush as early as April, 2002 to propose a $1 billion joint covert operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Woodward’s Plan of Attack also describes a meeting between the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and the president in November, 2002 in which Bandar was brought on board that train for Baghdad. The interests of the Saudis, Israel’s hard-line establishment, the lobby, and the oil industry seem to have quietly and smoothly converged in Baghdad.

Mearsheimer and Walt made their reputations as proponents of the ‘realist’ school of international relations, one tenet of which is that states act rationally in pursuit of their interests. In dismissing the relevance of the oil lobby, they argue that if U.S. conquest of the region’s oil were the goal, Saudi Arabia itself would have been a more rational target (particularly given the number of Saudis among the hijackers on September 11th). “Saddam,” they remark, “was eager to sell his oil to any customer willing to pay for it.”

The problem with applying realist thought in these circumstances is that states, particularly democratic states, don’t simply ‘make decisions’; their actions are the outcomes of complex interactions of various forces. The Bush family, for example, has longstanding ties to the Saudi monarchy. The overthrow of Hussein’s regime and the occupation of Iraq wasn’t the result of any single cause. Multiple factors were at play — the lobby not least among them — all in support of a vision of unfettered American power and the global projection of the ‘free market’ through shock and awe.

Ultimately, Mearsheimer and Walt’s case for the lobby as the sole cause of the Iraq war fails to capture the complexity of history. Their case for the detrimental impact of the lobby on U.S. foreign policy in general is more compelling. They propose that the U.S. return to a strategy of “offshore balancing” in the Middle East: abandon the neocon fever dream of regional transformation and withdraw military forces from the region — including Iraq — “as soon as possible.” Rescinding the threat to Iran would slacken its leadership’s need for a nuclear deterrent, they say, and increase the chances of negotiating a successful diplomatic resolution to that impasse. As for Israel, they recommend treating it as a normal state and slowly weaning it from the massive military subsidy that constitutes the “special relationship.”

Clearly, that subsidy provides the best leverage over the Israeli government to bring about the concessions required for a sustainable peace with the Palestinians. Yet any attempt to use that leverage will involve a collision with the power of the lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt don’t see much hope for an organization or coalition that could counterbalance the its power, nor do they think that campaign finance reform of the scope required to disarm AIPAC and its allies has much chance.

Whether out of naiveté or desperation (or over-esteem for their profession), in the end they place most of their faith in efforts to “encourage a more open debate about these issues.” The publication of their article and book has certainly opened up the debate, but has also amplified its contentious, superheated tone. This has proved to be deeply unsettling to an American Jewish community that feels trapped between its hard-line leadership and the fear of anti-Semitism. With Iraq and Lebanon smoldering, Olmert launching covert air strikes on Syria, and Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust while playing high-stakes diplomatic chicken, we must not back down from the challenge Mearsheimer and Walt present: to tame those who act in our name, before they help lead or cheerlead our way into another disastrous war.