Economic and Political Weekly August 26, 2006 them into their basic ethnic and religious components: Iraq is done with, Lebanon is currently being savagely pounded on the anvil. Syria and Iran await their fates, Egypt, bought and paid for, cowers, the Saudi and Gulf state rulers swing between helpless rage and fear.

Most of the time the strength of Zionist political and social influence goes unremarked in the US, even ignored. It is what the Americans call a “third rail subject” – to touch it is lethal to careers. But the great taboo was broken this year by two academics, eminent specialists in the broad field of international relations: John Mearsheimer of Chicago University and Stephen Walt of Harvard. They knew that their temerity would bring down upon them a storm of opprobrium, that they would be smeared as “anti-Semites”, their scholarship denigrated, their professional futures curtailed. But so alarmed are they by what they see as the dangers to their country – and indeed to the international community – posed by Washington’s unconditional, unwavering and unlimited support of Israel’s aggressive and expansionist policies and actions that they dared their fate and wrote an alarm call, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The Atlantic Monthly commissioned their study but then refused to accept it, advising the authors that no serious American publication would touch it. It appeared only when the London Review of Books published it in March 2006, in shortened form. The authors thenput the full text on the Harvard website – to that university’s obvious embarrassment.

The Mearsheimer/Walt paper asks a simple question: “Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?” It answers: because of the “stranglehold” the Israel Lobby has on Congress and its leverage within the executive arm. The authors are careful to point out that their subject is not the “Jewish Lobby”: by no means all American Jews support, or are part of, the Lobby, indeed those who do so comprise a minority; but, they write, “The core of the Lobby is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend US foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests”. They argue in their 80-page paper (half of it reference notes – curiously Tivnan’s precursor study is not mentioned) that the unbalanced commitment to Israel is clearly contrary to the strategic and political interests of the US. And they conclude with a negative answer to their own question, “Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed?” No, they answer: it will in fact inexorably grow still stronger – unless the subject can be brought into the open and debated within the US. It is precisely to stifle such debate that the Lobby has weighed in to trash and ridicule the paper and denigrate its authors. “Scurrilous”; “smelly”; “conspiratorial”; “nutty”; “amateurish trash”; “a meretricious, dishonest piece of crap” – and, of course, again and again, “anti-Semitic”: the attack is furious, virulent and sustained. Mearsheimer and Walt are both tenured professors and so cannot be dismissed, but they are marked men.

(In Israel there was generally a similar heated reaction but Ha’aretz struck a very different note, calling the paper a “serious and disturbing message [which] does not deserve condemnation – rather it should serve as a warning”.)

Centre for Research and Analysis on Livelihoods in South Asia (CRALSA) of Community Enterprise Forum International

Requires

Will the Lobby’s furious onslaught succeed in reburying the subject for another 20 years? Perhaps not. There are surface indications that a subterranean struggle against the Lobby has begun within the structure of government. In the fall two former senior officers of AIPAC are to go on trial on espionage charges, following months, perhaps years, of surveillance of their organisation by the FBI: the prosecution will no doubt be strengthened by the fact that it can present the evidence of a co-conspirator already under a 12-year jail sentence which could be reduced if he “sings” loudly enough. Convictions in that case might trigger a move to make AIPAC register as a lobby for a foreign power: it has obviously always been that in practice but its forced registration as such would greatly weaken it. Another sign: it is reported in Washington that at high levels in the Pentagon and other national security bureaucracies questionsare being asked about the security clearance of officials with dual American/Israeli nationality or with extensive personal or family links with Israel, and in some cases clearance has been removed.

In the meantime, however, perhaps the international community should be coming to terms with the emergence of a new “double-bodied state”. Feeble shortlived precursors might have been the United Arab Republic formed by Egypt and Syria, or original Pakistan: both aspired to a statehood linking two physically separate, indeed mutually distant and very different polities. But if the US and Israel are considered as “USrael”, it can be seen that this double-bodied state has an immense advantage, a common ruling elite with a shared purpose: unrivalled global hegemony, beginning with that of its west Asian “realm” – and it has the crushing military and nuclear superiority to achieve it.

It was reported in Israel a few years ago that in cabinet one day Ariel Sharon put down a colleague with these words: “Every time we do something you tell me America will do this, do that [against us]. I want to tell you something very clear – don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America…”. So far, perhaps, so true. But then he erred by adding “And the Americans know it”. The Americans certainly do not know it, and most probably they would be very angry indeed if they did. The urgency of the Lobby’s effort to preserve their ignorance is understandable. EPW