The article in which two American professors argue that the pro-Israel lobby shapes US Middle East policy in contravention of American interests is reverberating from Harvard University to Israel.
'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy', released in March, is being lambasted by Israeli right-wingers as inaccurate, poorly reasoned and anti-Semitic, while some dovish Israelis are using it as a launching pad for their own criticisms about the lobby and its hawkish stances.
There have been attacks on the pro-Israel lobby before, but this article has raised eyebrows because of the formidable academic credentials of its authors, political scientists Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer.
The article also contains 29 pages of footnotes where the claims are substantiated through events, books and articles.
Much of their criticism is focused on the lobbying activities of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
Professor Mearsheimer is co-director of the Programme on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before the Iraq war, he argued that military action was unnecessary because Saddam Hussein could be effectively contained.