An article by two prominent US academics arguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a dominant and damaging influence on US foreign policy has triggered a furious debate, pitting allegations of anti-Semitism against claims of intellectual intimidation.
Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, published two versions of the essay, "The Israel Lobby," in the London Review of Books and on a Harvard Web site.
The pro-Israel lobby and its sway over US policy has always been a controversial issue, but the bluntly worded polemic created a firestorm, drawing condemnation from left and right of the political spectrum.
Walt's fellow Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz -- criticized in the article as an "apologist" for Israel -- denounced the authors as "liars" and "bigots" in the university newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, and compared their arguments to neo-Nazi literature.
"Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism," wrote two fellow academics, Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, in a letter to the London Review of Books.
Mearsheimer said the storm of protest proved one of its arguments -- that the strength of the pro-Israel lobby stifled debate on US foreign policy.
"We argued in the piece that the lobby goes to great lengths to silence criticism of Israeli policy as well as the US-Israeli relationship, and that its most effective weapon is the charge of anti-Semitism," Mearsheimer said in an interview. "Thus, we expected to be called anti-semites, even though both of us are philo-semites and strongly support the existence of Israel."
The article argues that the US has "been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies" to advance Israeli interests, largely as a result of pressure from Jewish American groups such as the American Israeli Political Action Committee allied to pro-Zionist Christian evangelists and influential Jewish neo-conservatives such as former Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. It argues their combined influence was critical in the decision to go to war in Iraq.
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