The Tail Wagging The Dog ?!

The Role of The Israeli Lobby and AIPAC in American Middle East policy

In U.S. there are two weapons of choice, whenever a distinguished individual publishes a soundly researched paper or book critical of Israel or its powerful lobby.
The first weapon of choice is silence. If it's a book, it rarely gets reviewed and it's author never gets interviewed. If it's a paper, there are no news stories in the big corporate press, no interviews with the authors, no television appearances. For the average American who depends on the press and TV to tell him what's going on, it's as if the criticism never existed.
The second weapon is to launch vicious personal attacks and labeling the author as being anti-semitic.

There have been lots of papers and books by distinguished individuals that have "enjoyed" either or both treatments. Prominent examples of such papers and books are:
1. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter former president of U.S.
2. They Dare to Speak Out, by former Rep. Paul Findley.
3. The Passionate Attachment, by George W. Ball, the U.S. Undersecretary of State in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
4. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering; Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, by Norman Finkelstein, Jewish American professor of political science and the son of Holocaust survivors.

Both methods (silencing and personal attacks) are now again being used against an astounding paper titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. It was written by two renowned academics, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. It is worth noting that the Anti-Defamation League one of the interest groups in the Israeli Lobby, was quoted in a Jewish publication after the publication of the paper as saying that if the paper gained the attention of the mainstream media, then a "more vigorous attack" would be launched.

Read the short version of the paper here.
Read the unedited pdf version of the original paper here.
Read John Mearsheimer's and Stephen Walt's reply in London Review of Books to various negative criticisms here.
See the debate "The Israel lobby: does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?", which took place in New York on 28 September in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union.