Taking this book on to the Tube, I wondered whether I ought to wrap it in brown paper, or at least replace the jacket with something less controversial: Jeremy Clarkson's latest, perhaps. After all, it is hard to think of any book in recent years that has stirred up more outrage than The Israel Lobby.

Its authors have been described as anti-Semitic by, among others, The Washington Post, The New York Sun, The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal, while the Anti-Defamation League insisted that it was "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control". If its argument were "an actual person", insisted one Israeli historian, "I would have to say that he did not have a single honest bone in his body".

Incendiary stuff, then? To be honest, not really. Anyone who reads this book expecting slashing rhetoric and wild invective is going to be disappointed. Its two authors, after all, are professors of political science and international relations, and they write in exactly the style you would expect: sober, heavy, undemonstrative, even a bit dry.

This is hardly Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore; after all, it has more than 100 pages of endnotes in very small print. The thing it reminded me of most, in fact, was a doctoral thesis.

What has upset so many people about The Israel Lobby is its argument, which runs like this. Pro-Israel interest groups in the United States – notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac – have such a stranglehold over politics and public opinion that they have distorted American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Israel, the authors argue, is far less strategically important to the US than is commonly realised. It behaves badly in the Occupied Territories in defiance of world opinion; yet it continues to receive staggering amounts of American aid totalling, they estimate, some $154 billion, all because politicians and commentators alike are in thrall to "the lobby".

The lobby's activities, however, have been "harmful to the United States and Israel alike", by forcing politicians into aggressive policies, especially in Iraq, that undermine American popularity and make peace far less likely. To cut a long story short, the lobby is, as Sellars and Yeatman might say, a Thoroughly Bad Thing.

Whatever one thinks of this argument, to call it anti-Semitic is simply bonkers. Again and again, Mearsheimer and Walt distance themselves from anti-Semitism, repeatedly insisting upon Israel's right to exist, condemning Palestinian terrorism and dismissing the old canard that Jews "control the media".

Indeed, the fact that their book has encountered such outrageous abuse surely vindicates one of their central arguments: that pro-Israel lobby groups are so one-eyed that they toss accusations of anti-Semitism around like balloons at a birthday party.

The point cannot be made too strongly: this is not an anti-Semitic book. It's a work of scholarly analysis, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

As for their argument, the amazing thing is that anyone thinks it especially groundbreaking or controversial. Even the most ardent Atlanticist would have to admit that American politics is notoriously corrupt: as the authors point out, the Israel lobby is just one among many, from the National Rifle Association to the oil industry.

Yet there is plenty of evidence that Aipac is unusually good at its job. "We can count on well over half the House – 250 to 300 members – to do reflexively whatever Aipac wants," one congressional aide bragged recently. Newt Gingrich called Aipac "the most effective general-interest group [on] the entire planet".

And one Aipac official even boasted at lunch that in just 24 hours he could "have the signatures of 70 senators on this napkin" – though why he would want to is anyone's guess.

Do the authors think that Aipac's influence is illegitimate? No; they just think it's unhealthy. In a series of slightly plodding case studies, they try to show that pressure from the lobby has resulted in failed or destructive policies in the Middle East, notably towards Iraq, Syria and Iran.

Again, it beggars belief that any vaguely neutral observer could think this anti-Semitic or, indeed, untrue. Of course the Israel lobby exerts influence over American foreign policy; otherwise, there would be no point in its existence.

In any case, Mearsheimer and Walt argue not for the destruction of the lobby but for the diminution of its influence, which seems fair enough to me. "A country as rich and powerful as the United States," they write, "can sustain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored forever." Amen to that.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

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