The claim that conniving Jews are secretly running the country "is an old and repugnant canard," said Nicholas Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. Hence the "ruckus" last week when two "eminent" political scientists published a paper alleging precisely that. Harvard's Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer claim that Israel's friends in Washington have been discreetly shaping U.S. foreign policy for the past four decades, often in ways that run "counter to our national interest." This loose affiliation of Jewish lobbying groups and wealthy political contributors, say Walt and Mearsheimer, have made us the enemy of Muslims worldwide, by pressuring U.S. politicians to give unconditional support to Israel. The two academics even contend that Jewish powerbrokers prodded the Bush administration into invading Iraq, since they saw Saddam Hussein as a threat to Israel's security. There's no denying that this sounds a lot like standard anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, but is there also a grain of truth here?
Not one, said David Gergen in the New York Daily News. As an advisor to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, I can tell you first-hand that decisions in the Oval Office were always made with America's best interests at heart. The longstanding alliance between the U.S. and Israel is "rooted in noble values" that both democratic nations happen to share, not in any "sinister" conspiracy. U.S. governments have been pro-Israel for the simple reason that "the American people are pro-Israel," said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. A poll last month showed that more than two-thirds of Americans have a positive view of Israel, while just 11 percent have a positive view of the Palestinian Authority. Walt and Mearsheimer somehow fail to mention this fact in their "bitter anti-Israel screed."
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