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  Yet another respected pro-Palestinian columnist and University lecturer Juan Cole has fallen foul of America’s all-powerful Israeli lobby simply due to his honest convictions.

  Cole’s career was recently on the up-and-up with an approved appointment to teach Middle Eastern studies at America’s most prestigious university Yale.

  It wasn’t long after news of his post became public that Jewish lobbyists and their neo-conservatives supporters mobilized so as to nip it in the bud. Both, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute and Joel Mowbray, who writes for the Washington Times furiously penned anti-Cole opinion pieces, while Mobray urged Yale’s financial backers to prevent Cole from taking up his new position. Shockingly, they succeeded in their quest. Cole’s appointment was quashed. 

  Cole’s reaction was this: “The articles published in the Yale Standard, the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Slate and the Washington times, as part of what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, contained made-up quotes, inaccuracies and false charges. The idea that I am any sort of anti-Jewish racist because I think Israel would be better off without the occupied territories is bizarre, but I fear that a falsehood repeated often enough and in high enough places may begin to lose its air of absurdity.”

  Just how puissant the lobby is was highlighted in a recent controversial paper by two distinguished American professors John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard), published in the highly-respected London Review of Books.

  Although their essay was well-researched and carefully considered, the pair was blasted by Jewish groups and right-wing media pundits for being anti-Semitic. The Professors weren’t surprised. Indeed, they half expected this slur but proceeded with their paper anyway for the sake of intellectual integrity.

  Mearsheimer and Walt contend that America’s relationship with Israel has been the centre piece of US Middle Eastern policy since the 1967 “Six-Day War”.  They ask why has “the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?”

  Their joint conclusion is this: “The thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics and especially the activities of the “Israeli Lobby”. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

  Their paper particularly highlights the following points and anomalies.

- The US provides Israel with US 3 billion dollars annually even though, unlike other US aid recipients, Israel is considered a wealthy first world state.

- Israel is the recipient of American intelligence which the US refuses to share even with its closest allies or NATO and is provided with highly sophisticated American weaponry and airplanes.

- The US has vetoed 32 UN Security Council Resolutions critical of Israel since 1982 and has blocked the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the agenda.

- The Bush administration’s eagerness to transform the Middle East is partly aimed at enhancing Israel’s strategic position in the region.

- The claim of the current White House that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.

- Israel’s strategic value to the US is questionable because it does not behave as a loyal ally. “Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises…Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China… and “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally.”

- “Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.”

- The US media rarely criticizes Israel or defends an Arab standpoint. The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Washington Times, Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard “defend Israel at every turn”. The authors say their essay would never have seen the light of day in the US.

- The Lobby, and in particular AIPAC (The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), influences the US government and Congress by rewarding “legislators and congressional candidates who supports it agenda” and punishing “those who challenge it”.

  The bottom line, say the professors is this: “AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress…”

- Major US think tanks “which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as policy” are dominated by “the Israeli side”. These include WINEP, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, as well as JINSA (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs). Some of these think tanks pretend to be impartial but are secretly working to suit Israeli interests.

- Because of the Lobby’s influence “the US has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights”.

- The Lobby, partnered with neoconservatives attached to the Bush administration as well as Christian Zionists, has been the strongest advocate for the invasion of Iraq and regime change in Syria and Iran.

  It is little wonder, therefore, that Walt and Mearsheimer quickly became targets of the Lobby themselves, prompting them to write a letter in their own defense that was also published in the London Review of Books under the heading “Is it Possible to Have a Civilized Discussion About the Role of Israel in American Foreign Policy?”

  “We wrote “The Israel Lobby” in order to begin a discussion of a subject that became difficult to address only in the United States,” they state. “We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many positive responses we have received…”

  It was unfortunate that racists groups gave their public support to the original essay. This was picked up by the Lobby which tried its utmost to create a link between the professors and professed anti-Semites where none existed.

  Walt and Mearsheimer reject this link - deliberately fabricated to discredit them and their case - thus:

  “Regrettably, some of our critics have tried to smear us by linking us with overt racists, thereby suggesting that we are racists or anti-Semites ourselves. Michael Taylor, for example, notes that our article has been ‘hailed’ by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Alan Dershowitz implies that some of our material was taken from neo-Nazi websites and other hate literature. We have no control over who likes or dislikes our article, but we regret that Duke used it to promote his racist agenda, which we utterly reject.”

  One of those critics was the British columnist Christopher Hitchins – a former socialist, who for some strange reason has morphed into a neoconservative mouthpiece and taken up residence in the US. He has referred to the essay as “slightly but unmistakably smelly”. Reading between the lines, he has tarred it as being anti-Semitic.

  The Professors were further accused of giving credence to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the lines of a covert Jewish cabal trying to run the world, but they were, in fact, insistent that the Lobby is made up of a disparate group of individuals and institutions and, besides which, not all its members are Jews.

  That’s exactly right. An article published last March by Shlomo Shamir published in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz suggests a new Christian pro-Israel lobby aims to be stronger than even AIPAC.

  Shamir writes”: “Televangelist John Hagee told Jewish community leaders that the 40 million evangelical Christians in the United States support Israel and that he plans to utilize this power to help Israel by launching a Christian pro-Israel lobby.”  Hagee also plans to lead a delegation of 500 evangelical Christians to Israel this summer.

  Evangelicals who support Israeli ambitions do so because of their fervent belief in Biblical prophesies. They believe that Israel must rebuild its destroyed temple in Jerusalem before the Second Coming of Jesus. Some Jews are wary of this thinking while the more pragmatic welcome Christian support to further their cause in the short term without worrying too much about evangelicals’ motives.

  Edward S. Herman, economist and media analyst, says “Affluent Jews have responded generously in support of pro-Israel lobbying groups, especially in times of perceived threats to Israel. The leading US lobbying group AIPAC with an annual budget of some US$ 15 million in the early 1990s is widely thought to be the most influential lobbying body in the country…According to political analyst Stephen Isaacs, the Democratic National Committee gets about half of its money from Jewish sources”.

  He reports one non-Jewish strategist as saying: ‘you can’t hope to go anywhere in national politics if you’re a Democrat without Jewish money’.  This goes a long way to explaining why Hilary Clinton, who hopes to be the Democratic candidate during the 2008 presidential election, is kowtowing to Israeli interests.

  “Republicans have been less dependent on this source,” says Herman, but many of them (and their Christian right supporters) have been keen on Israel because of its harsh policies and support of US militarism.”

  Although the Lobby has a major influence over current US policy, it is keen to maintain the momentum by indoctrinating American students into supporting Israel.

  Anti-Arab propagandist Daniel Pipes via The Middle East Forum set up “Campus Watch” which urged students to report teachers and professors who dare to challenge US foreign policy and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

  Pipes has published dossiers on eight scholars who were not as supportive of Israel as he thought they should be, along with 146 names of people he says are apologists for militant Islam. Protesting on behalf of academic freedom more than 100 academics contacted Campus Watch asking for their names to be added to the list.

  Daniel Pipes is well known for his depiction of Muslims as “barbarians” who want to “replace the US constitution with the Koran”. Writing in the National Review some years back, Pipes put forward the thesis that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene.” And his co-ideologists have the barefaced nerve to refer to Walt and Mearsheimer as racist. 

  Pipes is also a regular contributor to the Jerusalem Post as well as the Gamla website, set up by settlers who seek the transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan.

  As a result of academia’s sheer outrage, Pipes was forced to abandon his “Campus Watch” project.

  Zachary Lockman professor of history at New York University’s Middle East Studies Department was incensed by the McCarthy-type tactics employed by Pipes and wrote him a letter. “Though I’d watched you in action for many years, I never thought you’d stoop quite this low, to such a crude effort to undermine the integrity and norms of academic life and achieve by innuendo, misinformation and implied threat what you could not achieve by reason and free intellectual exchange.”

  A growing number of intellectuals have welcomed the debate surrounding this taboo subject that has been courageously opened up by Walt and Mearsheimer, while the discussion has even slipped into the pages of the New York Times.

  Tony Judt asks this in his column “A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy” published in the New York Times: “Does the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course – that is one of its goals. And it has been rather successful…”

  As Holocaust survivors die off and memories dim, Judt warns that future generations of Americans will not be able to perceive Israel in its preferred victim role and wonder why “the imperial might and reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small controversial Mediterranean client state”.

  Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans and Asians are already asking why “America has chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue,” he says.

  This is the crux of the controversy surrounding the Walt and Meirsheimer paper. Of itself it is factual and balanced; not at all anti-Semitic. But if the debate were allowed to spread throughout campuses and was aired on television talk shows, the American people could be shocked out of their slavish support of Israel, viewed in many parts of the world as an illegal pariah state.

  In the meantime, due to the Lobby’s immense power, the short attention span of Middle America, and Arab-American failure to put forward its case in any meaningful way, the American people will live blissfully in their carefully contrived Cloud Cuckoo land for many decades to come. Professor Juan Cole and other pro-Palestinian activists have a long and lonely road ahead.