Starting with the earlier of the two books under discussion, we first decided to look at the Carter book (and by default then also The Israel Lobby when it was published on August 27, 2007) following a reading of. What made Stein’s comment seemed relevant is, because historian Kenneth Stein of Emory University is a former close associate of President Carter. From 1983 to 1986, he served as the first permanent executive director of the Carter Center, and after stepping down from that post, he was the center's Middle East fellow, a position he retained until December 2006. And those personal feelings certainly play a role in Carter's latest book. To illustrate this, consider Carter's misrepresentation of Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983 and co-winner with Egypt's Anwar Sadat of the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in signing the Camp David Accords. Jimmy Carter, of course, also deserves credit for his work in making the Camp David Accords possible. We must not forget that it was during the Carter administration that the single greatest stride toward a comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbors was taken. But it's clear, both from Carter's own accounts and from the reminiscences of other participants and observers, that in Carter's eyes the lion's share of the credit for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel goes to Sadat (and to Carter himself), with very little left over for Begin. In considering this part of the story, Kenneth Stein explained, During his tenure as prime minister, Begin forbade the negotiation agenda to include the West Bank and those portions of Jerusalem that the Israeli government annexed after the 1967 Six-Day War. This refusal to negotiate became Carter's core disagreement with Begin .... With Begin not offering a fallback position, Carter could not initiate a conclusive Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process. He never forgave Begin. So Begin refused from the outset to make any commitment regarding settlements on the West Bank-a stance that President Carter disagreed with and deeply resented. One might or might not fault Begin for his position on the West Bank settlements. Many observers agree with Carter that Israeli settlements on land that, under most proposed peace agreements, will ultimately become part of a Palestinian state have complicated the negotiating process. Carter may wish that Begin had taken a position on this issue more to his liking. But it's simply inexcusable to claim falsely that he did take such a position and then accuse him of deliberately reneging on an agreement. And whereas Carter is quick to interpret Israeli actions in the worst possible light, he seems all too ready to forgive, excuse, overlook, or even deny actions on the part of the Palestinians and their Arab supporters that have thrown roadblocks in the way of peace. One way in which he does this is by repeatedly quoting the words of Palestinian and Arab spokesmen making false or misleading statements of fact and then failing to challenge or correct them. As a result, the uninformed reader is led to assume that the false statements are true and that Carter is personally vouching for them.

Carter so also describes a March 1990, meeting with Syrian President Assad over the status of the Golan Heights, a disputed territory currently controlled by Israel but claimed by Syria. Stein attended that meeting and kept detailed notes. They indicate that Assad flatly rejected the notion of a demilitarized Golan Heights, saying, "we cannot accept this because we are sacrificing our sovereignty." But Carter's account suggests just the opposite. As Stein explains: Carter reworded the conversation to suggest that Assad was flexible and the Israelis were not .... This was not a slip of memory for Carter; Carter received a full set of my notes of the March 1990 trip after its conclusion. These were intentional distortions.Carter also recounts a conversation during January 2006, with Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi, a member of the Palestinian terrorist group Ramas: When I questioned him about the necessity for Ramas to renounce violence and recognize Israel, he responded that they had not committed an act of violence since a cease-fire was declared in August 2004 and were willing and able to extend and enforce that cease-fire (hudna) for "two, ten, or fifty years" -if Israel would reciprocate by refraining from attacks on Palestinians. Except, as Kenneth Stein points out, "Ramas on many subsequent occasions claimed responsibility for firing Qassam rockets into. Israel and also claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in June 2006." Unfortunately, you won't find Jimmy Carter setting the record straight. Distortions of the historical record like these, all leaning in one direction, help to explain why historians like Stein have responded to Carter's book with dismay. In December 2006, Stein resigned from the advisory board of the Carter Center, citing his unhappiness over Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid as the reason. One month later, fourteen other members of the board followed suit. In their public letter of resignation, they told the former president, "You have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side."

Perhaps the most significant example of how Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid distorts the facts of history involves the attempt at forging a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians during the last months of the Clinton administration. Eager to burnish his presidential legacy with a triumph for peace at the negotiating table, Bill Clinton worked hard at developing a compromise two-state plan that could satisfy both Palestinian demands for a homeland and the Israeli need for secure, defensible borders. What unfolded during 2000 and the early weeks of 2001 was an important episode in the recent history of the Middle East. Unfortunately, Carter's very sketchy (eight-page) account of what happened is seriously inaccurate. We can glimpse the nature of the inaccurliacy by starting with what might be called the case of the mislabeled maps. On a page in Carter's book are two maps, one labeled "Palestinian Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000" and the other, "Israeli Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000." Unfortunately, both labels are incorrect, as stated in an op-ed article by no less an authority than Dennis Ross, President Clinton's envoy to the Middle East and the primary architect of the administration's proposal. As Ross explains: The problem is that the "Palestinian interpretation" is actually taken from an Israeli map presented during the Camp David summit meeting in July 2000, while the "Israeli interpretation" is an approximation of what President Clinton subsequently proposed in December of that year. Without knowing this, the reader is left to conclude that the Clinton proposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them. But that is simply untrue .... It is certainly legitimate to debate whether President Clinton's proposal could have settled the conflict. It is not legitimate, however, to rewrite history and misrepresent what the Clinton ideas were. (See”advisory members protest former president's criticism of Israeli policy," Associated Press, Jan.11, 2007, http://www.msnbc.com/idI16579676).

Indeed, Carter clearly pins the blame for the failure of the Clinton initiative on Israeli intransigence. Here is Carter's summary: A new round of talks was held at Taba [Egypt] in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made [emphasis added]. Barak later said, "It was plain to me that there was no chance of reaching a settlement at Taba. Therefore I said there would be no negotiations and there would be no delegation and there would be official discussions and no documentation. Nor would Americans be present in the room. The only thing that took place at Taba were non-binding contacts between senior Israelis and senior Palestinians." The election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister two months later brought an end to these efforts to find accommodation. (Dennis Ross, "Don't Play with Maps," New York Times, Jan. 9, 2007, p.A17).

Notice what Carter is trying to do here. By insisting that no serious Israeli offer was ever made, he is depicting the Palestinians as willing negotiating partners and the Israelis as stubborn and uninvolved. The facts say otherwise. Detailed accounts by the two men most deeply involved in the ongoing negotiations-envoy Dennis Ross and President Bill Clinton himself-both flatly contradict Carter's version of events. I'll focus on Clinton's memoirs. They describe a series of Israeli proposals, each hammered out through tough negotiations between Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Clinton-and each short-sightedly shot down by Yasser Arafat. Here is Clinton's description of how the negotiations at Camp David in July 2000 foundered: It was after midnight when Barak finally came to me with proposals. They were less than what [Shlomo] Ben-Ami and [Gilead] Sher [two members of the Israeli negotiating team] had already presented to the Palestinians. Ehud wanted me to present them to Arafat as U.S. proposals. I understood his frustration with Arafat, but I couldn't do that; it would have been a disaster, and I told him so. We talked until two-thirty. At three-fifteen he came back, and we talked another hour alone on the back porch of my cabin. Essentially he gave me the go-ahead to see if I could work out a deal on Jerusalem and the West Bank that he could live with and that was consistent with what ben-Ami and Sher had discussed with their counterparts. That was worth staying up for . . .. [The next day], Arafat balked at not having sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. He turned the offer down. I asked him to think about it. While he fretted and Barak fumed, I called Arab leaders for support. Most wouldn't say much, for fear of undercutting Arafat.On the ninth day, I gave Arafat my best shot again. Again he said no. Israel had gone much further than he had, and he wouldn't even embrace their moves as the basis for future negotiations. (Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, pp. 152, 154).

Clinton tried again, in December 2000 and January 2001. In his memoirs, he devotes a page and a half to describing in detail the parameters for a settlement that he proposed to both the Palestinians and the Israelis. In Clinton's words, "I knew the plan was tough for both parties, but it was time-past time-to put up or shut up." Here is his account of what happened next: Arafat immediately began to equivocate, asking for "clarifications." But the parameters were clear; either he would negotiate within them or not. As always, he was playing for more time. I called Mubarak and read him the points. He said they were historic and he could encourage Arafat to accept them. On the twenty-seventh [of December], Barak's cabinet endorsed the parameters with reservations, but all their reservations were within the parameters, and therefore subject to negotiations anyway. It was historic: an Israeli government had said that to get peace, there would be a Palestinian state in roughly 97 percent of the West Bank, counting the swap, and all of Gaza, where Israel also had settlements. The ball was in Arafat's court. (Bill Clinton, My Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, pp. 914-15).

Days passed, with no clear response from Arafat. Clinton describes a January 2001 visit by Arafat to the White House, in which a seemingly confused Arafat continued to raise objections that seemed substance less to Clinton. "When he left;' Clinton remarks, "I still had no idea what Arafat was going to do. His body language said no, but the deal was so good I couldn't believe anyone would be foolish enough to let it go." (Ibid., pp. 943-45). But Arafat was. Here is how Clinton's account of the effort con- The parties continued their talks in Taba, Egypt. They got close, but they did not succeed. Arafat never said no; he just couldn't bring himself to say yes. Pride goeth before the fall. ... Arafat's rejection of my proposal after Barak accepted it was an error of historic proportions. It's hard to believe that Carter's misleading account is supposed to be a serious attempt to describe these same events. It's clear that, in reality, the Israelis made repeated offers to Arafat that went further toward accommodating Palestinian wishes than any previous offers had ever gone-and that Arafat simply refused to accept any of these offers, not even as the basis for further negotiations. No wonder Clinton finds himself quoting and agreeing with what "Abba Eban had said long ago, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." (Ibid., p. 924).

As Carter surely knows, Barak made these comments in the midst of an Israeli election campaign when his handling of the peace process was a major political issue. Barak was, of course, required by domestic political considerations to downplay his disappointment over the failure of the Taba talks and, even more important, to deny having made any major concessions that the Palestinians could try to claim later. For Carter-himself an experienced, canny politician-to cite these sentences as proof that the Israelis weren't negotiating in good faith is just silly. What's more, Carter inadvertently reveals that he is fully aware of this fact! He afflixes to Barak's comments the following footnote: "Despite this official disclaimer, substantive discussions were held at Taba, which proved to be the foundation for what evolved into the Geneva Initiative." Carter is trying to have it both ways. When it suits his argument, he claims that the Taba talks were meaningless; in the next breath, he calls them "substantive" so that he can claim them as precursors of the Geneva Initiative, the subsequent peace effort with which he himself was associated. The lapse in logic underscores Carter's desperation to line up the facts so that they support his case. But the facts don't budge. Perhaps we can agree that, at least, President Carter's version of the history of the Middle East is inadequate and, in some places, seriously misleading. But what about his policy prescriptions? Do these salvage some value for his book?

Viewed in the abstract, the political and diplomatic goals that Carter seeks are not particularly troubling. Like most decent people, he wants peace and justice in the Middle East. In pursuit of this objective, he calls for a two-state solution, with Palestinians and Israelis living securely side by side in their own countries. This, of course, is also the policy of Israel. The problem is his obsession with blaming Israel for this goal not being achieved. There are several serious problems with this approach-aside from its sheer factual inaccuracy.  First, Carter's blame-Israel stance encourages Israel-bashers around the world. The legitimizing factor of being able to quote a former president of the United States and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize when attempting to defend anti-Zionist misstatements cannot be overestimated.

Secondly, Carter's position gives comfort to the extremists on the Palestinian side who are reinforced in their extremism by this kind of "analysis:' By uncritically endorsing Palestinian denunciations of Israel and blindly accepting Palestinian claims of self-justification, Carter confirms the Palestinian hardliners in their belief that Israel is an illegitimate state whose every demand must be resisted and whose very existence is improper; and in their belief that when battling such an evil enemy, every weapon-including terrorist attacks on the innocent-is justifiable.Disturbingly, there is evidence in Carter's book that his encouragement of Palestinian extremism is not inadvertent but deliberate. Consider this paragraph from near the end of the book, in the chapter entitled "Summary:' in which Carter presents his general recommendations for the region: An important fact to remember is that President Mahmoud Abbas retains all presidential authority that was exercised by Yasir Arafat when he negotiated the Oslo Agreement, and the Hamas prime minister has stated that his government supports peace talks between Israel and Abbas. He added that Hamas would modify its rejection of Israel if there is a negotiated agreement that Palestinians can approve (as specified in the Camp David Accords). It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel. This paragraph requires a bit of unpacking to recognize just how breathtakingly one-sided it is. Hamas, we are told, will "modify its rejection of Israel if there is a negotiated agreement that Palestinians can approve." Think about what this says. If and when a complete peace settlement acceptable to the Palestinians is achieved-apparently as judged and determined unilaterally by them-then and only then will Hamas "modify [not necessarily abandon!] its rejection of Israel." In other words, Hamas may someday accept Israel's right to exist, but only after the Palestinians have received everything they want at the negotiating table! Forget the commonsense idea that negotiations should begin with both sides live in peace and freedom-such an acknowledgement, as far as the Palestinians are concerned (with Carter's support) is a possible end product, to be achieved only after negotiations have been concluded to the Palestinians' own satisfaction. Here's an analogy: A tense hostage standoff is in progress. A gunman who has already used violence on others is holding a prisoner and has his gun to her head. Negotiators demand that he release the prisoner or at least lower his gun. He replies, "After you agree to give me everything I want, including a flight to freedom, I will modify my threat to the hostage." Does this seem like a reasonable position for the gunman to take? Is it conceivable that the police would consider this an acceptable basis for negotiations? Apparently Jimmy Carter would. And then consider the meaning of this last sentence in that paragraph: "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel." Here, again, the concessions are all to be on one side. Carter is urging the Arabs and the Palestinians to promise that they will cease terrorism but only after Israel accedes to all their demands. As Carter makes clear throughout the book, his interpretation of "international laws" runs parallel to that of the Palestinians: If Israel wants peace, it must first turn over all the territory the Palestinians claim. In justification of this demand, they advance their own one sided interpretations of various UN resolutions-specifically, UN Security Council Resolutions 194, 242, 338, and 465. As Kenneth Stein notes, Carter offers only a "partisan rendition" of these resolutions, subtly transforming them into calls for unconditional Israeli withdrawal from territories in exchange for nothing but promises of negotiations from the Palestinians. (Stein, "My Problem with Jimmy Carter's Book.")

Until the most intransigent of the Palestinians get what they want, they are apparently-in Jimmy Carter's eyes-justified in continuing their acts of terrorism. Remember what he wrote: They should promise to end the suicide bombings when Israel accepts their demands not before. The analogy to the hostage-holding gunman is complete. As a result, to the extent that a book can affect world affairs, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is likely to have precisely the opposite effect from the one Carter claims to hope for: It will delay rather than accelerate the journey toward peace in the Middle East. In the end, it is the Palestinians themselves who are hurt by Carter's biased approach because they become even further entrenched in their illusions about weakening Israel and the need not to change. As Kenneth Stein" has perceptively remarked, By adopting so completely the Palestinian historical narrative, Carter may hamper diplomatic efforts enshrined in the "Road Map" and elsewhere that attempt to compel the Palestinian leadership to accept accountability for its actions. In pursuing this path, Carter violates the advice he gave eighty Palestinian business, religious, and political leaders on March 16, 1983, when, speaking to a gathering at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, he said, "Unless you take your own destiny into your own hands and stop relying on others;' you will not have a state (see Stein).

It's tempting to speculate as to why President Carter has developed his appalling blind spot about the State of Israel and his consequent sharp tilt toward the Palestinians. He is a man whose personal and public lives have been deeply intertwined. People in America and around the world have come to know a lot about his background, his values, and his private life: his boyhood in Depression-era Georgia, his traditional Christian upbringing, his service in the U.S. Navy, his colorful family (feisty Miss Lillian, eccentric brother Billy), his well documented opposition to racial segregation. It seems likely that Carter's religious views have colored his response to the peoples of the Middle East. Unlike the majority of Southern Baptists who now see the creation and strength of the State of Israel as part of the divine plan, he maintains a more traditional view that focuses on Jewish sin. Jimmy Carter, of course , is in many ways a good man. Which makes it all the more tragic that he has written a book about one of to day's most significant global conflicts that is filled with distortions, misstatements, misunderstandings, and errors-a book whose primary effect will be to give comfort and support to bigots and opportunists.

In fact in this sense it is much easier to double check the facts as published on August 27, 2007 in  “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. To mention a few we investigated, they select an out-of-context quotation from David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, to "prove" that Israel did not actually accept the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states: ''After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine." Yes, Ben-Gurion said these words. But when he was asked, in a follow-up question, whether he meant to achieve this by force, he replied, "Through such a nation. Hence, as she said, the emergence of a Palestinian fighting force represented "a new factor" in the Middle East. Over the years, her words have been repeatedly cited by anti-Zionists (and sometimes by outright anti-Semites) to "demonstrate" the dismissiveness of Israeli leaders toward the Palestinian people. No matter how often Meir later sought to clarify her meaning, the quotation was too useful for the biased to abandon. It's disturbing to see authors with a reputation for scholarship misusing it in the same old way. No wonder historian Benny Morris, whom Mearsheimer and Walt repeatedly cite as a source for their historical information, felt driven to respond. Morris is not an unthinking apologist for Israel. In books such as The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, he has harshly criticized Israeli actions and even claimed evidence for Israeli atrocities during the founding of the nation. Yet, disturbed by Mearsheimer's and Walt's misuse of his writings, Morris has written: Like many pro-Arab propagandists at work today, Mearsheimer and Walt often cite my own books, sometimes quoting directly from them, in apparent corroboration of their arguments. Yet their work is a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades. Their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity. Were "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" an actual person, I would have to say that he did not have a single honest bone in his body. (Benny Morris, "And Now for Some Facts:' New Republic, May 8, 2006).

Notable is also their denigration of the offer made by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and U.S. president Bill Clinton to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000, saying that it provided the Palestinians not with the land on which to establish a state but merely a collection of "Bantustans." The word is, of course, a reference to the phony "homelands" created by the abhorrent apartheid government in South Africa as a way of isolating and controlling the nation's majority black population. Mearsheimer's and Walt's use of the term is itself an emotional red herring, certain to inflame opinion against Israel by associating it with one of the most widely hated regimes of the postwar period-a rhetorical trick Not only do Mearsheimer and Walt select the most extreme negative depiction of what happened at Camp David, but they ignore the further concessions made by Israel in the negotiations at Taba, Egypt, several months after the violence of the second Intifada began. Mearsheimer and Walt further, relate the Palestinian issue to Islamist violence in Tunisia (1,400 miles from the territories), where, in April 2002, nineteen people were killed in a bombing at the ancient Ghriba synagogue, an attack for which al-Qaeda later claimed responsibility?  What about the Islamist attacks in Bali (in October 2002), Moscow (October 2002), Madrid (March 2004), Beslan, Russia (September 2004), and London (July 200S)? Are Muslims in all these countries motivated primarily or even to any significant extent by concern over the rights of Palestinians? Not even the attackers themselves make any such claim. The Mearsheimer and Walt theory that Israeli misdeeds in the Palestinian territories are at the root of Islamist terrorism simply isn't supported by the facts. We do not know of any unbiased terrorism expert who subscribes to this notion. Israel has been around for almost 60 years, and it has always faced terrorism. But never has a terror group emerged that is devoted solely or even primarily to attacking the United States for its support of Israel. Terrorists devoted to killing Americans emerged only after the United States began to enlarge its own military footprint in the Gulf. Al Qaeda emerged from the American deployment in Saudi Arabia.

In order to justify their accusations, Mearsheimer and Walt delib­erately distort basic realities. For example, they try to make the case that the Lobby stifles any discussions that might lead to criticism of Is­rael, and they have searched diligently for evidence to prove this point. Apparently the evidence was hard to come by, since even the examples they cite tend to undermine rather than prove their case. Here are a couple of examples. Mearsheimer and Walt write: There is ... a strong norm [among Jewish leaders] against criticizing Israeli policy, and Jewish-American leaders rarely support putting pressure on Israel. Thus, Edgar Bronfman Sr., the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of "perfidy" when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid­ 2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial "security fence." Critics declared that "it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of IsraeI:"

Let's put aside Mearsheimer's and Walt's tendentious summary of this incident, which implies that it demonstrates the "strong norm against criticizing Israeli policy;' and consider what actually happened. The president of a leading Jewish organization (actually a federation of in­ternational Jewish communities and organizations) did in fact criticize Israeli policy-and in a letter to the president of the United States no less. He was then subsequently criticized for his action by another Jew­ish leader who disagreed with him. Does this illustrate lock-step con­formity among Jewish leaders or healthy, open disagreement? I'd say the latter. Here is the second example Mearsheimer and Walt use to try to prove their point:  Similarly, when Israel Policy Forum president Seymour Reich advised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pressure Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip in No­vember 2005, critics denounced his action as "irresponsible behavior," and declared that, "There is absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the se­curity-related policies ... of Israel." Once again, a Jewish leader criticizes Israel publicly; then another Jew­ish leader disagrees with him, equally publicly. These stories are supposed to demonstrate how the Lobby enforces rigid ideological con­formity when it comes to Israel? Some conformity! Not only can't the Lobby control the rest of America-apparently, it can't even control its own leadership.

When Mearsheimer and Walt try to show the overwhelming power of the Lobby to control political debate about Israel, they focus on the U.S. Congress. From a rhetorical point of view, that's not sur­prising. There is, in fact, a high degree of support for the State of Israel and for some (though not all) Israeli policies in the halls of Congress among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. This state of af­fairs might give the impression that "Jewish control" is a reality. However, when we look more closely at the evidence that Mearsheimer and Walt adduce to try to prove that Congress supports Israel purely because of the political clout of the Lobby, it is surpris­ingly weak. For instance, here is the sole example they offer of a member of Congress whom the Lobby successfully "punished" for ideological impurity: There is no doubt about the potency of these tactics [i.e., AI PAC's attempts to influence election campaigns]. To take but one example, in 1984 AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had "displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns." Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ''All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians-those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire-got the message."

And  sure, there is a lobby (lower-case L) made up of Americans who believe that U.S. interests are best served by a strong alliance with Israel is obvious and non-controversial. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) bills itself as "America's Pro-Israel Lobby." It is registered as a domestic lobby, is supported by donations from over 100,000 individual members, and receives no financial backing from Israel or any other foreign entity. There is nothing unusual about this. Spend ten minutes on Google and you can easily find similar advocacy groups that represent the interests of Irish Americans, Mexican Americans, Indian Americans, Italian Americans, and practically every other imaginable ethnic and national group in the United States. Only the American lobby for Israel seems to be subject to such intense critical scrutiny and even demonization by people like Mearsheimer and Walt. Yet they are also careful to state that they are not suggesting any conspiracy by Jews aimed at world domination, like that depicted by the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But their claims of even-handedness and objectivity, in the end, are merely lip service, because of the nonstop one-sidedness of their presentation, their gross exaggeration of the power of the lobby, their disregard for the consistently broad-based American public support for Israel, their omission of the very many interests that the U.S. has in a strong and safe Israel, and their overriding theme that policymakers are controlled by the lobby. No matter how the authors protest, all of this adds up to an effort to delegitimize the work of pro- Israel activists.

Similar is when they explicitly state that they do not consider the Israel lobby to be a conspiracy or cabal, yet why do so many readers of the book believe exactly that? The answer is very simple: Page after page of "The Israel Lobby" is filled with assertions, anecdotes, accusations, and claims that, taken together, either explicitly state or clearly imply that American supporters of Israel work together in a coordinated fashion to distort the nation's foreign policy on behalf of illegitimate goals (namely, the enhancement and expansion of Israeli power in the Middle East) that the majority of Americans would not support if they fully understood them; to control the U.S. government in the pursuit of those goals; and to suppress any dissent or attempt to challenge their policy positions, not through fair and open debate, but through the use of political power to intimidate and silence opponents. This clearly and unmistakably describes a conspiracy or cabal. The mere fact that the authors don't use the word "conspiracy" or "cabal," and that they even take the trouble to write a few sentences claiming that they are not describing a conspiracy or cabal, doesn't change the fact that that is what they are describing.

The myth: Jews have used their political power in the United States to ensure that Israeli interests inevitably prevail in the shaping of American foreign policy. The reality: It's true that the United States and Israel have a strong alliance. But the notion that Israeli interests somehow control U.S. foreign policy is absurd. American governments are no more subservient to the wishes of Israel than they are to the demands of Great Britain, France, Mexico, Japan, or any other important U.S. ally. History shows that there have been many times when the U.S. government followed a foreign policy agenda that differed from the one that either the Israeli government or American Jewish supporters of Israel favored. For example in 1981, the newly installed Reagan administration announced plans to sell five U.S.-made E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft (colloquially known as AWACs) to the government of Saudi Arabia. These were among the most advanced military equipment then in existence, equipped with a powerful antenna capable of detecting and tracking other aircraft within an area of 175,000 square miles. The government of Israel was very worried about the impact this sale could have on the security of their country and on the prospects for peace in the region, and they made their concerns felt in no uncertain terms. Prime Minister Menachem Begin expressed "profound regret and unreserved opposition" to the proposed sale. And many observers with no particular ax to grind shared Begin's concerns. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) called it "one of the worst and most dangerous arms sales ever;' and his colleague Bob Packwood (R-Oregon) warned that the sale would "promote continued instability in the Middle East." What happened? Did the power of the Lobby halt the sale? Not at all: after a season of intense lobbying by the Reagan administration, Congress approved the sale in October 1981.

A second example dates from 1991. It was a critical time in the history of the Middle East. The United States had just led an international coalition that had driven the armies of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in the first Gulf war. A major effort to restart the peace process was being promoted by President George H. W. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, with plans being developed for a regional confers might take over portions of the disputed territories. In this heightened atmosphere, President Bush decided that the time was right to challenge Israel on its policies in the occupied territories. As his vehicle for this challenge, he chose a $10 billion set of loan guarantees that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had requested. In a combative press conference on September 12, Bush announced that he would recommend that Congress turn down the request. He also complained about the efforts of pro-Israeli spokespeople to change his mind, contrasting the work of "a thousand lobbyists" with his own, supposedly lonely stance on the opposite side: "one little guy down here doing it.” (Donald Neff, "Israel Requests $10 Billion in U.S. Loan Guarantees for Soviet Immigrants;' Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April/May 1995). It was a performance by the president, one that led to strained relations between the United States and Israel for months to come. But the point is that the president got his way. Congress followed his lead in delaying consideration of the loan guarantees. Israel, for its part, succumbed to U.S. pressure and agreed to participate in the Madrid peace talks. Partly as a result of the tension between the two countries, Shamir was defeated in his effort to win reelection the following June. Bush had shown that, like any other lobby, the Israel lobby has just as much power as American politicians are willing to grant it-in this case, not very much.

In conclusion, Mearsheimer and Walt clearly re­gard themselves not as bigoted but as serious scholars attempting to make a responsible argument. But their claims of even-handedness and objectivity, in the end, are merely lip service, because of the nonstop one-sidedness of their presentation, their gross exaggeration of the power of the lobby, their disregard for the consistently broad-based American public support for Israel, their omission of the very many interests that the U.S. has in a strong and safe Israel. In fact the Mearsheimer and Walt Book has many of the ele­ments that are familiar from the classic anti-Jewish conspiracy theo­ries throughout history. Visit any anti-Semitic website, read any anti-Semitic tract, attend any meeting by a hate group that targets Jews, and you'll hear the same old themes: the Jews have too much power; they are more loyal to "their own kind" and to the State of Is­rael than they are to their native country; they exercise political influ­ence not as individual citizens but as a cabal, working together behind the scenes to force non-Jews to do their bidding.

As for the Palestinian issue the single most frequented claim is that;"The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the central issue in the Middle East. It is at the heart of all other disputes involving the Arab and Islamic worlds, and until it is settled there can be no peace in the region." Yet notice also here how the nature of the issue is subtly shifted in the formulation we just cited. First, the conflict over Israel is described as "Israel versus the Palestinians." This is, in itself, a tendentious and distorted way to think about the problems in the Middle East. The rights, interests, and needs of the Palestinian people are certainly important and a legitimate cause for concern. Like all other peoples, the Palestinians deserve the opportunity to live in peace, to own their own lands, and to pursue happiness in the way they choose, provided they respect the rights of their neighbors to enjoy the same privileges. The so-called two-state solution, which has been accepted in theory and practice by all the concerned parties, is the agreed-upon path to ensuring that both the Palestinians and the Israelis wilt enjoy those rights. The difficulty, of course, lies in how we reach the two-state solution. Like the Palestinians, the Israelis want a stable and secure nation within defensible borders. Drawing those borders and ensuring that Israel and its people will be safe behind them has proven to be a difficult matter. The fact that Israel continues to be the target of military and terrorist attacks from its neighbors, including both the Palestinians and their allies in Lebanon and elsewhere, puts Israeli leaders in a seemingly impossible situation. How can they work out and enforce a fair settlement with an enemy that continues to attack them, denies their legitimacy, and refuses to renounce the ultimate objective of destroying them? The problem, of course, is much bigger than Israel and the Palestinians. The problem is that Israel is bordered not just by the Palestinian territories but by an array of hostile Arab states that have mostly refused to playa positive role in resolving the tensions in the region. In fact, they have exacerbated those tensions largely because it serves their domestic purposes to have Israel and the Jews as handy scapegoats for all the problems of the region. This is one of the reasons that the other Arab states, such as Jordan, flatly refused for decades to resettle or otherwise assist the Palestinian people. It served the purposes of the Arab leaders to be able to point to the aggrieved Palestinians as victims of big, bad Israel. The grievances of the Palestinians became a convenient excuse for the unrelenting hostility of the Arab states, as well as for the economic and political failures of those same Arab states. For these reasons, describing the issue as one of "Israel and the Palestinians" serves the purposes of pro-Arab and anti-Israel propaganda. It throws the spotlight on the problems and rights of the Palestinian people, creating the implication that it is up • Israel to redress those problems and ensure those rights. At the same time, it throws a shadow over the bigger issue of "Israel and the Arab states;' obscuring the fact that most of the countries in the region still refuse to recognize Israel, to guarantee its freedom and security, and to promise not to attack Israel or to support terrorists who launch such attacks. This formulation transforms Israel-a tiny country surrounded by hostile neighbors-into the "big bully" picking on the helpless Palestinians, and provides all the other powers in the region with a handy excuse for doing nothing to promote a real peace agreement in the Middle East. Furthermore, naming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the central issue in the Middle East distorts the discussion of the future of the Middle East by apparently justifying any degree of Arab or Islamist intransigence, hatred, and violence directed toward either Israel or the United States. As we've seen, the idea that the global Islamist movement is mainly driven by resentment over Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is a canard. But it's a useful one for propaganda purposes. The fact that Israel exercises a degree of control over the lives and movements of Palestinian people in the territories under its jurisdiction is an uncomfortable reality for the Israeli people. The Jews created Israel not in order to have dominion over any other people but simply in order to have a homeland they could call their own and in which they could live in peace, ruling themselves as they saw fit. In self-defense, the Israelis were forced to take control of some Palestinian lands, which to this day are a source of attacks against Israel.

Partly against its will, Israel was put in the position of being a conqueror. And given the recent remark by US Secretary of State Rice ("Palestinians must have a state that meets their aspirations") in refernece the Middle East peace conference to take place next month, they want to get out of the position of governing the Palestinians as quickly as possible-as long as the price is not national suicide. Israelis, then, are deeply ambivalent about the Palestinian territories. Some might say they have a guilt complex about them. Almost every other country in history has, at some point, taken lands from its neighbors, sometimes for reasons that can be justified, sometimes not. To pick an obvious example, every square inch of the United States was taken from its previous owners at some point, often by force of arms. But because of Israel's humanistic heritage, its idealistic origins, and the religious and ethical traditions of its people, Israel agonizes over the territories it holds far more than other nations do. The Palestinian territories are the one potential moral weak spot in the case for Israel. Everyone, including the Israelis, agrees that the Palestinians should govern themselves, though bringing this about has proven to be painfully difficult. But as long as some Palestinians remain under Israeli rule, this fact can be pointed to by the Arab regimes and their sympathizers around the world as "proof" that Israel is power-hungry, tyrannical, racist, an obstacle to peace and freedom. It's the one argument the Islamists have in their bill of grievances against the West that gives a semi-plausible moral strength to their position. This is why they harp on it whenever they get the chance. And this is why it is important for clear-headed thinkers to reject the formulation that describes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as "the key to peace in the Middle East." Yes, it's vitally important that the Palestinian people have a homeland of their own, governed democratically and with integrity, in which they can live in peace with their neighbors. But this is just one of several equally important keys to long-term peace in the Middle East.

In April 2007, the well-known New York Times columnist David Brooks attended a conference in Jordan that was cosponsored by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the American Enterprise Institute. I want to quote Brooks's account of what happened at the conference at some length because I find it both significant and disturbing. The goal of the conference, Brooks explains, was to bring together moderate Arab reformers with American experts and leaders to discuss ways of moving toward peace and democracy in the Middle East. He writes: As it happened, though, the Arab speakers mainly wanted to talk about the Israel lobby. One described a book edited in the mid-1990s by the Jewish policy analyst David Wurmser [a reference to Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein] as the secret blueprint for American foreign policy over the past decade. A pollster showed that large majorities in Arab countries believe that the Israel lobby has more influence over American policy than the Bush administration. Speaker after speaker triumphantly cited the work of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter as proof that even Americans were coming to admit that the Israel lobby controls their government. The problems between America and the Arab world have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism or ideological extremism, several Arab speakers argued. They have to do with American policies toward Israel, and the forces controlling those policies. . . . But the striking thing about this meeting was the emotional tone. There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization. But there was nothing defensive or introspective about the Arab speakers here. In response to Bernard Lewis's question, "What Went Wrong?" their answer seemed to be: Nothing's wrong with us. What's wrong with you? The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is-from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in Aipac [sic]. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer book on the Israel lobby is already seen today, to have  a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network. It would be unfair however to hold the loosely allied group of pundits that includes Mearsheimer, Walt, Carter, strictly responsible for how their ideas are used-or misused.

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