THE LOBBY.(The Talk of the Town)(The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-SEP-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Last year, two distinguished political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, published a thirty-four-thousand-word article online entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a shorter version of which appeared in The London Review of Books. Israel, they wrote, has become a "strategic liability" for the United States but retains its strong support because of a wealthy, well-organized, and bewitching lobby that has a "stranglehold" on Congress and American elites. Moreover, Israel and its lobby bear outsized responsibility for persuading the Bush Administration to invade Iraq and, perhaps one day soon, to attack the nuclear facilities of Iran. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish a book-length version of Mearsheimer and Walt's arguments on September 4th.

Mearsheimer and Walt are "realists." In their view, diplomatic decisions should be made on the basis of national interest. They argue that in the post-Cold War era, in the absence of a superpower struggle in the Middle East, the United States no longer has any need for an indulgent patronage of the...

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