ISRAEL AND TOP ZIONIST LEADERS ATTACK INTELLIGENCE

ISRAEL AND TOP ZIONIST LEADERS ATTACK INTELLIGENCE

James Petras

December 8, 2007

"The most important thing (sic) that should be said about Bush is that

had I told him that I was opposed to this move (Annapolis meeting), he

wouldn't have embarked on it. I could have blocked the move. Had I

been unwilling to co-operate with him, Bush wouldn't have coerced

me....I spoke to the President with unparalleled sharpness about these

matters (bombing Iran's nuclear facilities) and my comments were

extremely well received - regarding the freedom (to bomb Iran) we are

reserving for ourselves and what we will and won't do.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Haaretz November 29, 2007.

Introduction

During and immediately after the Annapolis meetings to discuss peace,

Israel abducted the student president of Beir Zeit University for

dissent, launched over 50 attacks on Gaza killing and wounding over 50

Palestinian civilians, police and militia, set in motion a vast

building project of 250 new apartments in Palestinian East Jerusalem,

projected permanent Israeli military posts in the West Bank, rejected

any time limits or specific goals in their negotiations with the PLO

and launched a virulent dismissal of the major US intelligence report

(National Intelligence Estimate) on the non-existence of an Iranian

nuclear weapons program.

Israel's presence at Annapolis had absolutely nothing to do with peace

or promises to negotiate in good faith: Their purpose was to deflect

attention from their meat-grinder style genocidal policies in Gaza and

their relentless drive to savagely dispossess all Palestinians of any

territory or semblance of autonomy, literally turning off the lights

(energy), gas and water to 1.4 million Palestinians residing in Gaza.

Since September 11, 2001 the Israeli state, Zionists inside the US

government and the entire leadership of the Major American Jewish

Organizations have been entirely devoted to pushing the US into Middle

East wars on behalf of Israel. In the run-up to the Iraq War, Zionists

in top strategic decision-making positions in the Pentagon, the Vice

President's Office, the White House and the National Security Council

designed and executed war policy, fabricated evidence, wrote

Presidential speeches, organized press conferences and presidential

agendas, purged critics in the military and intelligence agencies and

altered intelligence reports to suit their purposes.

Israeli and Zion-Con success in destroying Iraq however was secured at

an enormous cost in US military casualties, demoralization and one

trillion dollars (and counting) in cost to the US taxpayers. As a

result, public opinion dramatically shifted against the war, despite

the intervention of the Israeli regime in shaping US public opinion

via its army of 'Israel-First' academic and journalistic scribes and

propagandists with broad access to the US mass media.

As I pointed out in an earlier article, the devastating effects, which

the Israeli-Zioncon-promoted Iraq War has had on the US military, and

intelligence agencies, led to widespread opposition within the US

state to the Israeli-Zionist push for mounting a new war against Iran.

This historic struggle over Iran policy split the top echelons of the

Washington policy making. On the one hand, the Israeli Firsters

controlled or influenced the White House, the majority of Congress and

key Congressional committee chairpersons, the financing of both major

political parties, the leading presidential candidates and the bulk of

the mass media. The opposition was led by senior active and retired

military officers, backed by the great majority of middle level

officers and ground troops, especially the reserves. The entire range

of top intelligence officials were disgusted by the 'Israel Firsters'

in the Pentagon because of their distortion of their previous reports

and fabrication of 'intelligence' via newly invented agencies and

their reliance on Israeli disinformation over US intelligence.

This monumental struggle within the government was not merely about US

military policy toward Iran (which is crucial) but also about who

rules the US, who commands the US military and who formulates

intelligence reports that inform policy, and more basically whose

interests are being served. The military command in the Middle East,

led by Admiral William Fallon, came out publicly opposing the Israeli-

Fifth Column policy to bomb Iran. The active commanders were meekly

backed by the rubber-spined Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, and

surreptitiously (at first) by the top intelligence chiefs. The Zion-

Cons retaliated by launching the White House and Congress in a crusade

to escalate economic sanctions and to 'keep the military option' on

the table. Every major Israel-First academic and propaganda think tank

followed up the Israeli war planning with a wave of op-ed articles and

interviews throughout the mass media about Iran's immediate nuclear

threat. The President, who does nothing contrary to Israeli Prime

Minister Ehud Olmert (as trumpeted by Olmert himself), pronounced an

apocalyptic message to the world in October 2007 (six weeks before the

National Intelligence Estimate was finally released) proclaiming the

advent of 'World War Three' against Iran's nuclear weapons program and

the threat of a nuclear attack (a 'holocaust') by Iran against the

people of the US and Israel.

The White House was privy to the findings in the National Intelligence

Estimate (NIE) on Iran at least 9 months before they were made public,

as witnessed by President Cheney's frequent interventions to alter

their content and conclusion and repeated efforts to postpone their

publication because it undermined the basis for their push to attack

Iran. The Israeli government and its US Fifth Column, well aware of

the forthcoming publication of the findings of sixteen top US

intelligence agencies, did everything in their power to precipitate a

US war with Iran, from issuing hair-raising tales of the 'existential

threats to Israel's survival' to encouraging, rousing bellicose

speeches by AIPAC, Zionist and Jewish community leaders. Israel went

to war with Iran's ally (Hezbollah) in Lebanon, bombed Syria which has

a mutual security pact with Iran, escalated Israeli-trained Kurdish

terrorist attacks across the Iranian border in order to provoke

Iranian retaliation - to no avail. AIPAC and its Congressional allies

led by Israeli-US Senator Lieberman pulled all stops to force a

conflict, increasing sanctions against bankers and corporations

dealing with Iran and even labeling the Iranian military special

force, the 'Republican Guards' as an illegal 'terrorist organization'

and thus an automatic target of US military attacks under the doctrine

of the 'War against Terror'. The hyper-activity, the vicious military

attacks, the strident rhetoric against all critics of the military

option, and the urgency, with which the Israelis and their US

supporters acted, was not due to any imminent Iranian nuclear threat

but a desperate effort to precipitate the war before the US NIE became

public and undermined their entire war propaganda campaign and

military preparations for an attack.

The NIE findings temporarilyclosed the book on the White House-Israeli-

Zionist Big Lie that Iran was engaged in developing weapons to launch

a nuclear war. The NIE report refuted its own previous conclusions of

2005, which were heavily influenced by the White House and its Zionist-

Israeli backers. The reversal of conclusions was not based on 'new

data' or information techniques as is claimed. The change resulted

from a dramatic shift in the balance of forces within the US

government and in particular the strengthening of the US military

elite versus the pro-war Zionist Power Configuration, a shift shaped

by the enormous and unending American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A key factor in pushing the US intelligence agencies to break with

their past subjugation to White House manipulation and Israeli-Zionist

fabricated intelligence was the repeated failures and incredible

stupidity of the Israeli intelligence agencies - leading to a loss of

their credibility. Israeli intelligence blundered and miscalculated on

Hezbollah's strength and organization which led to a debacle when

Israel invaded Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israeli estimates on

Iraqi capacity to resist invasion and foreign occupation (so eagerly

accepted and propagated by top Zionist Pentagon officials in the lead

up to the invasion) led to the now 6 years of a US war of attrition in

Iraq with no end in sight. Israel's intelligence totally

underestimated Hamas' electoral strength in the run-up to their

electoral victory over the PLO. Israeli intelligence overestimated the

PLO's military capacity to defeat and destroy Hamas in Gaza. Israel's

claim to have detected a nuclear facility in Syria, which it bombed,

was an international joke - as even Moses could not have destroyed a

(fictional) nuclear facility without producing a speck of radioactive

dust! Learning from Israeli intelligence agencies' tendency to feed

disinformation to its clients in the US Government in order to further

Greater Israel's claims to Mid-East hegemony at the expense of

Washington's long term interests, the US national intelligence

community asserted its independence and published its report denying

each and every Israeli-Zionist-White House assertion concerning Iran's

nuclear weapons program and, in particular, pointing to the end of

research into nuclear weapons as far back as the fall of 2003.

Israel Rejects the US NIE

While governments, the United Nations and experts around the world

recognized the rigorous, systematic, comprehensive methods used to

compile the data leading to the report declaring that Iran was free of

nuclear weapons programs, one and only one state objected: The Jewish

State of Israel. And in the USA only one nationwide configuration of

organizations refused to reconcile itself to the absence of any

Iranian military threat to Israel (not to speak of the US, a distant

secondary consideration) and that was predictably the Zionist Power

Configuration, specifically the Presidents of the Major American

Jewish Organizations.

Speaking for the Israeli Government, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, with

the predictable arrogance and contempt that Israeli officials treat

any US policy analysis or statement that doesn't pass their editorial

approval and toe their line, dismissed the NIE: 'We cannot allow

ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the

other side of the earth (sic) even from our greatest friend'.

(Guardian of London, December 4, 2007). Though the NIE may weaken the

White House drive to war, the fact that Israel rejects the report

means that its war preparations will continue and that means that its

entire Zionist Power Configuration in the US will continue to pursue

Israel's interest in destroying Iran.

Following Orwellian logic AIPAC twisted the NIE report to fit Israel's

rejectionist lead (as it never fails to do) by arguing that the NIE

report bolsters the case for continued confrontation, belligerency and

isolation (Jewish Telegraph Agency, December 4, 2007). In fact

according to the perverse argument of AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, the

absence of any Iranian nuclear weapons threat should result in greater

pressure on Iran! 'All in all, it's (the NIE) a clarion call for

additional and continued (my emphasis) effort to pressure Iran

economically and politically to end its illicit nuclear

program.'(Jewish Telegraph Agency, December 4, 2007).

Once again the Israel Firsters - embracing all the major Zionist

organizations and community councils - defy all logic, and the most

comprehensive and in depth empirical intelligence report of the US in

favor of the propaganda emanating from the failed Israeli intelligence

agencies and the Israeli regime. In a continuous barrage of articles

and television interviews, the entire Zionist Power Configuration

(ZPC) buried the NIE report, refocusing attention on themes like

'Iran's nuclear program still a threat' (Daily Alert, December 7,

2007). During the entire week (December 3-7, 2007) the Presidents of

the Major American (sic) Jewish Organizations - covering the entire

range of financially powerful Jewish organizations in the USA -

published an average of nine articles (nearly 50) propagating the

Israeli line. The articles disparaged, distorted and dismissed the NIE

and continued to push for the 'military option' (euphemism for

launching a massive attack on Iran) as well as new economic sanctions

to destroy the Iranian economy and the livelihood of its 70 million

citizens. The euphoria of anti-war critics who claim the NIE report

laid to rest the threat of a new US war with Iran is premature, as is

their idea that the 'Israel Lobby' was dealt a decisive blow. The ZPC

never lost a beat: Israel Firster and Zion-Con fanatic, US Treasury

Undersecretary, responsible for terrorism and financial intelligence,

Stuart Levey, succeeded in convincing China to tighten trade credit,

making trade more difficult and costly for Iran's private sector.

(Financial Times, December 6, 2007, p. 1).

Internationally, the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary David Millband

- a long-time supporter of Israel with close family ties to the

Zionist state - predictably followed the Bush-Israel-ZPC line in all

but dismissing the NIE report and emphasizing the need to 'keep the

pressure on Iran'. Millband, who on his recent visit to Israel,

refused to even pass a glance at Israel's shutdown of electricity and

fuel to the 1.4 million Palestinians caged up in Gaza, spent an entire

evening exchanging pleasantries with his settler relatives in Tel

Aviv. He accused the non-nuclear Iran of being a major threat to the

international community because it produces what he called 'fissile

material' and 'missiles'. Every large and medium size country in the

world produces enriched uranium and possesses missiles; to impose a

sinister construction on Iran's civilian and defense projects is

laughable. (Financial Times, December 6, 2007) Millband dismisses out

of hand their civilian application and parrots word for word his

Israeli mentors' line about 'hidden programs' and other such

unsubstantiated Zionist propaganda. Recent revelations of large-scale,

long-term Zionist financing of the highly indebted Labor Party's

electoral campaigns by millionaire moguls and self-proclaimed 'Labor

Friends of Israel' (Independent, December 6 2007) suggests that

Millband's rapid rise to head the Foreign Ministry had less to do with

his minimal international affairs experience and more to do with the

'special relations' between millionaire Zionist fundraisers and past

and present Labor Party leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

In France President Sarkozy appointed Zionist zealot Bernard Kouchner,

(a fervent supporter of humanitarian intervention including the US

invasion of Iraq), to head the Foreign Ministry after 'consultations'

with leading French Jewish organizations, which had rejected an

earlier candidate, deemed not pro-Israel enough. Bernie Kouchner and

Nicky Sarkozy immediately picked up the Israeli line, dismissing the

NIE Report and calling for new economic sanctions even as the original

justification (Iran's so-called nuclear weapons program) was found to

be a lie. Nicky and Bernie called for a new UN National Security

Council resolution adding greater sanctions against Iran (AFP,

December 7, 2007). The Bush-Millband-Kouchner-Israeli logic parallels

Stalinist-Nazi logic -- the more the intelligence reports demonstrate

the absence of a nuclear weapons program, the greater the nuclear

threat; the lesser the present threat, the greater the future threat;

the lesser the empirically verifiable threat, the greater the secret

threat. The NIE report made liars of the White House and Congressional

Democrats and the Presidents of the Major American Jewish

Organizations who 'knew' Iran had a nuclear weapons program. Even more

revealingly, it demonstrates that for the same war mongers, Iranian

nuclear weapons is not the motivating force for their drive to attack

Iran. Leaving out the weapons motive, it is abundantly clear that

attacking Iran through sanctions and military threats is deeply rooted

in the Israeli priority of destroying Iran as an adversary to its

Middle East power grab and its assault and territorial dispossession

of Palestinians.

The ZPC, Millband, Kouchner, Olmert, and the White Houses' efforts to

push for a third round of UN sanctions is likely to be rejected. On

December 4, China's UN Ambassador, Wang Guangya, announced that the

NIE report called into question the need for new sanctions, 'I think

we all start from the presumption that now things have changed. I

think council members will have to consider that.' (Al Jazeera,

December 5, 2007). China, with $17 billion dollars in direct trade

with Iran and up to $30 billion via Dubai, and with Iran as a major

Middle East oil supplier and with no Zionist lobby to reinforce

Israeli diplomatic pressures, is free to pursue its own national

interests. The case can be made that Russia, under President Vladimir

Putin, will follow China's lead and object to new sanctions.

Nevertheless, the US Congress and in particular its influential

Committee chairpersons continue to blindly follow Israeli Prime

Minister Ehud Olmert's pronouncement post-NIE: 'It is vital to pursue

efforts to prevent Iran from developing a capability like this (sic)

in the United States'. Leading Congressional Israeli-American zealot,

Thomas Lantos, convoked a congressional hearing on the NIE Report and

invited two top ex-government advisers and ultra-Zion zealots, David

Wurmser and Martin Indyk to testify.

Conclusion

There is no question that the anti-(Iran) war groups in the US

military and intelligence agencies struck a serious blow to the

ongoing war plans of the White House, Israel and their agents in the

ZPC. The setback includes a temporary defeat of its massive war

propaganda and their fabrication of an 'existential threat' to the

world community (Israel)'. Nevertheless the publication of the NIE hit

the headlines for only a few days, followed by a barrage of hostile

propaganda in all of the US mass media which called into question the

peaceful intentions of Iran and even twisted certain probabilistic

phrases to contradict the main findings.

From the vantage point of Americans trying to free their government

and the American public of Israeli and ZPC tyrannical monopoly of

opinion, the NIE Report struck a blow against the credibility of the

White House and Zionist spokespeople in the Congress, National

Security Council, Homeland Security and the Justice and Treasury

Departments regarding Iran's so-called nuclear weapons program. But

the quickness, depth and scope of the Israeli response especially

magnified by its representatives in the US, the French and British

foreign offices, demonstrates that the pro-war Israel Firsters are

still deeply embedded in positions of political power and willing to

defy the US intelligence and military establishment. Without shame or

substance, with aggressive outbursts and manipulative semantical

skills, the ZPC moves forward toward new sanctions, despite the

systematic empirical refutation of its principle argument. Only a

blind, irrational tribal-ethnic loyalty to Israel can account for the

ready denial of the NIE report and automatic embrace of Israel's

continued fabrications. As in the thirties when overseas Nazi

sympathizers defended Hitler's' lies about Communists torching the

Reichstag and Communist fellow travelers defended Stalin's purges as

exemplary judicial processes, our Zionists continue to deny every

systematic empirical report (like the NIE) which contradicts Israel's

lies and fabrications about Iran's nuclear weapons programs.

Beyond the important issue of dual loyalties (very much in evidence in

the ZPC's response to the NIE report) there is the re-emergence of the

question of a US-backed Israeli war with Iran. The military option

will be buttressed by an Israeli military intelligence propaganda

report dismissing the NIE. It will claim secret Iranian nuclear

weapons programs buried somewhere near the center of the earth and

therefore undetected by US intelligence informants, satellite photos,

UN inspectors, defecting (or kidnapped) Iranian Generals or any other

US source. Only Israel's superior intelligence agencies (which failed

in Lebanon, Iraq and the Gaza Strip), based on its Chosen People (with

their unassailable intelligence hot-line to the 'Omniscient One' - the

same 'One' who does the 'Choosing') can be right - even if they have

to once again 'cook the data' to make the case to the uninitiated.

The NIE and the US Military have struck a blow against the planners of

World War III. Will this lift the US Congress off its collective knees

to finally address US interests in the Middle East? Will it re-awaken

a currently moribund peace movement, terrified to confront the most

virulent organized warmongers? Will it allow Congress and the US

public to challenge the ZPC's stranglehold on US-Middle East policy?

Will the British public and peace movement dare to challenge a Labor

Government and Foreign Office bought and paid for by the 'Labor

Friends of Israel'? Will the French public and intellectuals of Paris

recover their republican credentials and reject its first and foremost

Israel First regime?

Two weeks after the Annapolis Meeting, Israeli Housing Minister Zeev

Boim gave US Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice the 'bristly

cucumber' (a Mediterranean style 'slap in the face') when she pleaded

with the Jewish state to stop building new settlements in Palestinian

East Jerusalem because, 'it doesn't help to build confidence'. Boim

went on to say, 'Secretary of State Rice should be congratulated for

her efforts in re-launching the peace process (sic)...but this cannot be

constantly linked to the cessation of construction in Jerusalem...There

is thus nothing to prevent construction anywhere else in Israel.' (Al

Jazeera, December 8, 2007).

Just as the Jewish state can dismiss its vague promises to the Bush

regime on the so-called 'peace process' in short order, so does Israel

reject the NIE report on the absence of a nuclear weapon program in

Iran and prepare for war - backed by the entire ZPC.

Surprisingly it is not liberal or leftist opinion leaders who have

raised the relevant issues pertaining to the questions of war and

peace in the Middle East, the Israeli-White House threats of starting

World War III. It is the spy agencies in the US and their allies in

the US military, the paragons of past wars and present destabilization

campaigns (read - Venezuela). It is an irony of history. But just the

same, this is the real world in which we live, where Western

intellectuals and cultural heroes have abdicated their responsibility

to challenge the Zionist Power Configuration operating on behalf of an

aspiring Middle East colonial power.

James Petras 'latest books are The Power of Israel in the United

States(Clarity Press 2006) and Rulers and Ruled in the US

Empire:Bankers ,Zionists and Militants(Clarity Press 2007)

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Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:31:11 -0800

From: "Jeff Blankfort"

Subject: American Conservative: The Lobby Strikes Back

"By the end of October, two months after The Israel Lobby appeared in

stores, there had not been a single positive review in the mass-market

media. For a long time it seemed that no editor dared trust the

subject to a gentile, causing blogger Philip Weiss to ask cheekily,

"Do the goyim get to register an Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?" By

then, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Sun, and

The New Republic between them must have printed 25 attacks on Walt and

Mearsheimer, virtually all of them designed to portray the authors as

beyond the pale of rational discourse....

This is a thoughtful review from the American Conservative which is

far better than anything I have seen in the traditional ideologically

oriented "Left" journals, another example of how the Left keeps its

eyes shut and its mouth closed when the lobby's puppets genuflect to

Israel as if that is part of the natural order of things. As the

article points out, just like the by-lines of non-Jews can almost

never be found on stories regarding Israel, and just like every

ambassador to Israel has to be Jewish, any gentile that has the

temerity to criticize Israel publicly will quickly find herself or

himself branded as an "anti-semite" or considered as such by those

"pwogwessive" Jews who act as if they are the only ones (apart from

Palestinian Arabs who don't have the same access to the general

public) with the right to criticize Israeli policies towards the

Palestinians. Hence, we have Jews-only demonstrations of which gentile

supporters are not informed and to which they are not invited.

Someone, after all, might just show up with a sign that reads "Zionism

= Racism."

This sentence alone, further down in the article, is a real winner.

Discussing the neocons, McConnell writes: "But in view of their

convictions and pivotal positions inside the executive branch and

ability to shape policy at the very top, to say that neoconservatives

"overlap" with the Israel lobby hardly does them justice: the faction

might more properly be described as, to borrow the well-known phrase,

the highest stage of the Israel lobby."

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/cover.html

December 3, 2007 Issue

The Lobby Strikes Back

A new book riles the AIPAC crowd, but makes it to the bestseller list

anyway.

by Scott McConnell

One prism through which to gauge the impact of John Mearsheimer and

Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy is a

September incident involving Barack Obama. His campaign had placed

small ads in various spots around the Internet, designed to drive

readers to its website. One turned up on Amazon's page for the Walt

and Mearsheimer book. A vigilant watchdog at the New York Sun spotted

it and contacted the campaign: Did Obama support Walt and

Mearsheimer?

The answer came within hours. The ad was withdrawn. Its placement was

"unintentional." The senator, his campaign made clear, understood that

key arguments of the book were "wrong," but had definitely not read

the work himself. In short, Walt and Mearsheimer had reached a

pinnacle of notoriety.

Though The Israel Lobby was on the way to best-sellerdom and has

become perhaps the most discussed policy book of the year, the

presidential candidate touted as the most fresh-thinking and

intellectually curious in the race hastened to make clear he had not

been corrupted by the toxic text.

The episode illustrates one of the book's central arguments: the

Israel lobby is powerful, and American politicians fear its wrath. Any

Democrat running for president--drawing on a donor stream that is

heavily Jewish, very interested in Israel, and perceived as hawkish--

would have reacted as Obama did.

In their book's introduction, Walt and Mearsheimer summarize the

consequences of this power. In an election year, American politicians

will differ radically on domestic issues, social issues, immigration,

China, Darfur, and virtually any other topic. But all will "go to

considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one

foreign country--Israel--as well as their determination to maintain

unyielding support for the Jewish state." The authors find this

remarkable and deserving of analysis, which they provided first in a

paper, posted last year on Harvard's Kennedy School website and

published in the London Review of Books, and now expanded into a

book.

This is not the first time a prominent American has taken on the

subject. George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Johnson and

Kennedy administrations and the government official most prescient

about Vietnam, a bona fide member of the Wall Street and Washington

establishments, called for the recalibration of America's Israel

policy in a much noted Foreign Affairs essay in 1977, and at the end

of his life co-authored a book on the subject with his son. Eleven-

term congressman Paul Findley, defeated after a former AIPAC president

called him "a dangerous enemy of Israel," wrote a book that became a

bestseller, and there are others.

But no one with the combined skills and eminence of Walt and

Mearsheimer has before addressed the subject systematically. These two

are mandarins of American academia, having reached the top of a field

that attracts smart people. They have tenure, job security, and

professional autonomy most journalists lack. They have the

institutional prestige of Harvard and the University of Chicago behind

them. Most importantly, they bring first-rate skills of research,

synthesis, and argument to their task.

One might wish that their book had been different in some ways--more

literary, more discursive, more precise in some of its definitions,

deeper in some areas, more (my favorite, from blogger Tony Karon)

"dialectical." But The Israel Lobby is an extraordinary

accomplishment, completed with great speed--a dense, factually based

brief of an argument that is often made but rarely made well.

In public appearances discussing their book, Walt and Mearsheimer are

tremendously effective: measured, facts at their fingertips, speaking

with the fluency of men accustomed to addressing demanding audiences.

Most of all, while treating a subject where hyperbole is common, they

are moderate. They are respectful of Israel, admiring of its

accomplishments, and extremely aware that criticism of Israel or the

Israel lobby can turn ugly and demagogic. As might be expected of top

scholars in America, they are fully conscious of what Jews have

suffered in the past and how much anti-Semitism has been a moral blot

on the West as a whole. So while they have none of the excessive

deference, guilt feelings, and reluctance to engage so typical of the

remaining WASP elite, they are very well-modulated. Their detractors

would have preferred loose-tongued adversaries, Palestinians whose

words are raw with loss and resentment, a left wing anti-Zionist like

Noam Chomsky, or genuine anti-Semites. Instead, with Walt and

Mearsheimer, they are encountering something like the American

establishment of a vanished era at its calm, patriotic best.

It is obvious that The Israel Lobby, both the article and the book,

would be extremely unwelcome to those pleased with the status quo.

Under the current arrangement, the United States gives Israel $3-4

billion in aid and grants a year--about $500 per Israeli and several

orders of magnitude more than aid to citizens of any other country.

Israel is the only American aid recipient not required to account for

how the money is spent. Washington uses its Security Council veto to

shield Israel from critical UN resolutions and periodically issues

bland statements lamenting the continued expansion of Israeli

settlements on the Palestinian land the Jewish state has occupied

since 1967. When Israel violates U.S. law, as it did in Lebanon by

using American-made cluster bombs against civilian targets, a low-

level official may issue a mild complaint. These fundamentals of the

relationship go unchallenged by 95 percent of American politicians

holding or running for national office.

Walt and Mearsheimer's goal was to ignite a conversation about the

lobby--which they define expansively as an amorphous array of

individuals, think tanks, and congressional lobbying groups that

advocate Israeli perspectives--and its consequences, which they believe

are damaging to America's core strategic interests in the Middle East.

They support Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and while they

readily summarize Israeli blemishes, drawing on Israeli sources and

the arguments of the country's revisionist "new historians," they are

fully aware that no modern state has been built without injustices.

They seek a more normal United States relationship with Israel, rather

like we have with France or Spain, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace

settlement that can start to drain the poison out of American

relations with the Arab world.

At least in a preliminary sense, they have started a discussion. The

initial working paper on the Kennedy School website was downloaded

275,000 times, throwing Israel's most ferocious partisans into a

panic. Deploying a McCarthyite tactic, the New York Sun quickly sought

to link the authors to white supremacist David Duke. The New Republic

published a basketful of hostile pieces. Several pro-Israel

congressmen initiated an embarrassing effort--ignored by the

institution's president--to get the Naval War College to cancel

scheduled lectures by the two. In a column about "the Mearsheimer-Walt

fiasco," neoconservative writer Daniel Pipes summed up his dilemma: it

would have been better, Pipes said, to have ignored the essay by "two

obscure academics" so that it disappeared "down the memory hole"

instead of becoming "the monument that it now is." Pipes was wrong

about this. Hostile reaction to the piece hadn't inspired a quarter of

a million downloads. With the United States mired in a quagmire in

Iraq, increasingly detested in the Muslim world, and wedded to an

Israel policy that, beyond America's borders, seems bizarre to friend

and foe alike, Walt and Mearsheimer had touched a topic that was

crying out for serious analysis.

And the book could do more than the article. Arguments could be filled

out, footnotes could be easily read. The 2006 Lebanon War--which saw

the American Congress endorse the Israeli bombardment by the kind of

margin that would satisfy Nicolae Ceausescu, while seeming genuinely

puzzled that moderate Arab leaders did not join their applause --was

analyzed as a test case. A book could continue the discussion and

deepen it. But the book's enemies (how odd that a book could have

enemies, but there is no better word for it) had time to prepare their

ideological trenches, and within a month or two of publication, one

could see the shape of the defense.

By the end of October, two months after The Israel Lobby appeared in

stores, there had not been a single positive review in the mass-market

media. For a long time it seemed that no editor dared trust the

subject to a gentile, causing blogger Philip Weiss to ask cheekily,

"Do the goyim get to register an Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?" By

then, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Sun, and

The New Republic between them must have printed 25 attacks on Walt and

Mearsheimer, virtually all of them designed to portray the authors as

beyond the pale of rational discourse.

Anti-Semitism was not a credible charge. The authors make clear that

the lobby isn't representative of the views of all or even most

American Jews, and they support an Israel within recognized

boundaries. Their recommendation that the United States treat Israel

like a normal country is hard to demonize. Ditto their repeated

assertions that lobbying is a perfectly normal part of the American

system and that conflicted or divided loyalties have become

commonplace in the modern world. But what many did was to discuss the

book in a context of anti-Semitism, to convey the impression that The

Israel Lobby was a deeply anti-Semitic book without explicitly saying

so. Thus Jeffrey Goldberg, in a 6,000-word New Republic piece,

introduced Walt and Mearsheimer after a detour through Osama bin

Laden, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, and, of course, David Duke.

He eventually called the book "the most sustained attack ... against the

political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father

Coughlin."

Samuel G. Freedman in the Washington Post opened his discussion of the

book by invoking the New Testament concept of original sin, whose

burden one can escape only through acceptance of Jesus Christ. A

passage from Romans, Freedman claims, framed the book's argument--"if

unintentionally." When was the last time the Washington Post

introduced a serious foreign affairs book with Bible talk that had no

bearing on the work in question?

One of several Wall Street Journal attacks on the work claimed, "it is

apparently the authors' position that ... [in the face of Arab

lobbying efforts] American Jews are obliged to stay silent." This

statement is more than a misrepresentation of Walt and Mearsheimer's

argument, it is a flat-out lie. Did the editors who assigned and

published the piece know this? Was discrediting the book so important

that normal American journalistic standards had to be waived?

Another track of the demonization campaign was the repeated effort to

cancel the authors' appearances or to demand that opposing speakers be

invited to "rebut" their noxious views, a format hardly typical for

authors on book tours. Unfortunately, these initiatives sometimes

succeeded, as when the Chicago Council for Global Affairs cancelled an

event at a venue where the two professors had spoken many times

before. Some efforts to marginalize the book were more like parody, as

when Congressman Elliot Engel complained that Professor Mearsheimer

had been invited to participate in a Columbia University forum on

academic freedom.

It would be na