Rupert Cornwell: Out of America

Say what you like about American policy in the Middle East – you can't pretend that the natives, at least in my neck of the woods, don't care about it.

Politics and Prose is an independent up-market bookstore in north-west Washington, about half a mile from where I live. On a sweltering evening last Wednesday it was packed to the rafters, so tightly they had to call an ambulance for an elderly man who fainted in the steamy crush.

And what was the cause of the fuss? John Mears-heimer and Stephen Walt, professors of international relations at the universities of Chicago and Harvard respectively, were there to talk about their new book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, an expanded version of a paper that first appeared, not in a US publication, but in the London Review of Books in March 2006. There was an almighty rumpus then, and there may be an even bigger one now.

As its name suggests, The Israel Lobby makes a point obvious to any foreign observer of US affairs. The lobby, the book states, has wielded massive influence in securing America's unwavering support for Israel, support that has been a major contributory factor – some would say the biggest single contributor – to the multi-faceted mess in the Middle East. From the spread of terrorism to the debacle in Iraq, from the crisis with Iran to the futile 2006 war in Lebanon, the lobby here has been nothing but trouble, in each case pushing Washington in a direction opposed to US national interests.

Until Mearsheimer and Walt tossed their literary hand grenade, the topic was generally passed over in silence. Now that they have, the row has served to highlight their opponents' most effective weapon: the ability to portray criticism of Israel as rank anti-Semitism.

On Wednesday, the pair did their best to deflect such charges in advance. Israel has an unchallengeable right to exist, they said, and if that existence is genuinely threatened, the US should act to protect it. They also acknowledge there is nothing wrong with the lobby per se. Interest groups seeking to influence policy were part of the system, "as American as apple pie", Walt insisted – and AIPAC, the main pro-Israel political group, just happens to be ferociously good at its job.

Its membership, moreover, includes many non-Jews, as does the wider "Israel lobby", a loose coalition that embraces not just Jewish groups, but thinktanks, Christian evangelicals and of course the neo-conservatives so prominent in Bush administration policy-making, many of whom are not Jewish at all.

Similarly, American Jewry itself is anything but monolithic – as demonstrated by the current issue of Tikkun, the liberal Jewish magazine, and its cover story, "The Israel Lobby: Bad for the US, Bad for Israel, Bad for the Jews". And while AIPAC's leaders might have cheer-led the invasion of Iraq, American Jews in 2003 were 10 per cent less likely to support the war than the public at large. On the specific Israeli/Palestinian dispute, polls show that 75 per cent of Americans want their government to take an even-handed approach.

But if so, why does the Israel lobby wield such power, when it must compete against other entrenched interests (energy and arms industry lobbies, for instance) in influencing Middle East policy? One reason is the age-old truth that power is the perception of power. In all-important Congress, AIPAC's power is legendary. That polarised body will disagree on everything – except on support for Israel where generally no more than 30 of 435 members of the House of Representatives refuse to toe the lobby's line.

"Better to sign one letter supporting Israel than write 5,000 letters answering complaints you don't," was one Congressman's wry tribute to AIPAC's ability to turn the screws on a waverer. In the mid-1980s, at least two Senators are held to have lost their seats because of perceived anti-Israel votes they cast. In each case Jewish groups, it is said, poured money into their opponents' coffers. The same goes for the presidential candidates. Like Congress, they quarrel about most issues. But when it comes to Israel, from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to the Republican Fred Thompson, who has just formally entered the race, everyone is on the same page.

And if the perception of power is not enough to do the trick, then the smear of anti-Semitism will – or, in the case of Jews who dare to criticise Israeli policies, the label of "self-hating Jews". Take, for example, former President Jimmy Carter, architect of the 1978 Camp David accords and a decent man if ever there was one. But he was denounced as a "Jew-hater" after his recent book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, pointed out the abject conditions under which Palestinians live in a land shared by two peoples, one of whom dominates and persecutes the other.

To be fair, Mearsheimer and Walt faced no such abuse the other night. But the tone of the questions was often sceptical. Was the Israel lobby really so powerful? Why did despotic Arab regimes in the region get a free pass? Is Osama bin Laden really as upset by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as he claims?

Their reply was simple. Israel's behaviour was neither worse nor better than anyone else's. Thus, the US should treat it as a normal country, like Britain, Germany, or Japan: close allies, but with whom Washington regularly gets tough if it feels US interests are at stake. But for Americans, Israel is unlikely to become "normal" any time soon. The Mearsheimer/Walt book has already spurred Deadliest Lies, a 256-page counterblast from Abe Foxman, head of the fiercely pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League, attacking "paranoid fantasies that re-inforce anti-Semitic myths".

And, as the Politics and Prose session was in full swing, the "lobby" struck again. Norman Finkelstein, a popular professor at DePaul University in Chicago, was forced to resign. His offence? To have suggested that some Jews might have improperly exploited the legacy of the Holocaust.