Attacking the Israel lobby

last updated 8 January 2015

Cambridge, Mass.

Two U.S. scholars last week published an unusually scathing attack on what they term the “Israel lobby,” suggesting that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked by Israel’s American supporters. “No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy so far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest,” said Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They argue that the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, in concert with “neoconservative gentiles,” friendly pundits, and a group of mostly Jewish officials, goaded the U.S. into invading Iraq. The paper drew immediate protests from prominent American Jews, with Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz calling it “one-sided” and denouncing the authors as “liars” and “bigots.”