Like cancer, ideas can metastasize. In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt--the former a professor at the University of Chicago, the latter at Harvard--came out with The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. A "situation [that] has no equal in American history" had arisen, they wrote in the book (and in a paper bearing the same title posted on Harvard's website). A domestic pressure-lobby--a body mostly comprising "American Jews making a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests"--had accumulated "unmatched power" and was using it to "skew" the American political system for its own narrow ends. Among other things, the Jewish lobby had used its "stranglehold" on Congress and "manipulation" of the mass media to propel the United States into war in Iraq.
Mearsheimer and Walt provoked a raging controversy, but apart from a few pockets in the universities and on the far left and right (the white supremacist David Duke was among their most enthusiastic endorsers), the book was mostly given short shrift. Reviewing The Israel Lobby in the New York Times, Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, expressed dismay at the "puzzlingly shoddy scholarship" that led Mearsheimer and Walt to "fuel, inadvertently, . . . the fires of anti-Semitism."
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