appeared exactly at the right time, when a large public was ready to absorb their message.
It may well turn out that the book by two professors, John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, is just such a book.
It is a dry scientific research report, 355 pages long, backed by 106 further pages containing some 1,000 references to sources.
It is not a bellicose book. On the contrary, its style is restrained and factual. The authors take great care not to utter a single negative comment on the legitimacy of the lobby, and indeed bend over backwards to stress their support for the existence and security of Israel. They let the facts speak for themselves. With the skill of experienced masons, they systematically lay brick upon brick, row upon row, leaving no gap in their argument.
This wall cannot be torn down by reasoned argument. Nobody has tried, and nobody is going to. Instead, the authors are being smeared and accused of sinister motives. If the book could be ignored altogether, this would have been done-as has happened to other books that have been buried alive.
(Some years ago, there appeared in Russia a large tome by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world-renowned laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, about Russia and its Jews. This book, called 200 Years Together, has been completely ignored. As far as I know, it has not been translated into any language, certainly not into Hebrew. I asked several of Israel's leading intellectuals, and none of them had even heard of the book. Neither does it appear on the list of Amazon.com, which includes all the author's other works.)
The two professors take the bull by the horns. They deal with a subject that is absolutely taboo in the United States, a subject nobody in his right mind would even mention: the enormous influence of the pro-Israel lobby on American foreign policy.
In a remorselessly systematical way, the book analyzes the lobby, takes it apart, describes its modus operandi, discloses its financial sources and lays bare its relations with the White House, the two houses of Congress, the leaders of the two major parties and leading media people.
The authors do not call into question the lobby's legitimacy. On the contrary, they show that hundreds of lobbies of this kind play an essential role in the American democratic system. The gun and the medical lobbies, for example, are also very powerful political forces. But the pro-Israel lobby has grown out of all proportion. It has unparalleled political power. It can silence all criticism of Israel in Congress and the