With the 2008 US Presidential campaign in full swing, the nominees are lined up like genuflecting supplicants seeking the blessings of the Israeli government. Four Republican front-runners—Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitch Romney and Newt Gingrich—and the front running liberal among the Democrats, John Edwards, all participated in the annual Herzliya Conference in the Israeli resort town in January of 2007, each attempting to prove themselves the most loyal friend of Israel. Romney promised a five-point plan aimed at confronting Iran, whom Israel has long considered an enemy. Employing rhetoric identical to that of Vice-President Dick Cheney, the great liberal hope Edwards told the conference “all the options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon.” These nominees represent the political spectrum in mainstream US politics and illustrate the unanimity among the candidates of both parties in their unquestioning support of Israel.

A new book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, by mainstream academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, questions the US government’s blind support of Israel. The authors discount strategic reasons for US sponsorship of Israel. “Even if Israel was a valuable ally during the Cold War,” they say, “the justification ended when the Soviet Union collapsed.” In fact, “viewed objectively, Israel is a liability” for the US in both the War on Terror and in its battles with rogue states. The US government’s unconditional support of Israel is undermining relations with other US allies in the area, claim the authors.

The authors list various types of aid Israel receives from the US. First, the US gives Israel $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, an amount equal to about two per cent of Israel’s GDP, and about 75% of this is military aid. The US gives the equivalent of $500 in aid per citizen of Israel. Egypt, the second largest recipient of US aid, receives the equivalent of $20 per person. On top of this aid, Israel benefits in a number of other ways from the US taxpayer. Israel receives its aid in a lump sum, instead of in quarterly installments. This allows Israel to collect interest on the unspent portion of the aid throughout the year. Israel receives “excess defense articles” for free or at huge discount. A single US appropriations bill in November 1990 authorized a transfer to Israel of $700 million worth of US equipment. The US government also provides aid to Israel in the form of loan guarantees, which allows Israel to borrow money at much lower rates, saving itself millions of dollars. The US permits Israel to use the foreign aid to subsidize Israel’s own armaments industry, a right no other recipient of US aid has. On top of all this, Israel receives about $2 billion annually in private donations from US citizens and organizations.

The authors document the pro-Israel lobby’s manipulation of the US Congress in copious detail. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], one of many pro-Israeli lobbying groups, “inserts itself directly into the legislative and policy-making process,” write the authors. They cite a former congressional staff member who claims that elected officials “often called upon [AIPAC] to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes.” The authors document the lobby’s involvement in many of the United States’ most catastrophic foreign policy decisions over the last 50 years in the Arab world.

The US support of Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land and ongoing oppression of the Palestinians is at the root of anti-Americanism throughout the region. The neo-conservatives, who dominate the current president’s regime, have been among the most outspoken supporters of Israel. Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey and David Wurmser are only a few of the neo-cons who have held senior positions in the Bush administration and who have supported the most right-wing elements in Israeli society.

But even during Bush Jr’s benighted reign of error, there have been feeble attempts at pressuring Israel towards some sort of agreement with the Palestinians. The authors recount one such effort by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in April of 2002, when he visited the area trying to pressure the Israelis to stop the fighting. Immediately the more militant pro-Israeli elements in the Bush administration began undermining Powell, at the same time as big guns in the pro-Israel US media began to intensify criticisms of Powell. Writing in the Weekly Standard, a neo-con flagship, William Kristol railed that Powell had “virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists.” Powell later called the trip the “ten most miserable days imaginable.” Similarly, AIPAC undermined Bush’s vague “Roadmap to Peace” by demanding “that the Palestinians be required to comply fully with the plan’s security requirements before Israel had to make any concessions,” according to the authors.

Currently the mainstream media is trying to cover-up the ties between the Israel lobby and Bush’s disaster in Iraq. This book exposes these lies for what they are. Walt and Mearsheimer argue that “the war was motivated at least in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure,” and provide well documented “evidence that Israel and pro-Israel groups played important roles in the decision to invade” Iraq. The authors quote a number of neo-cons, many who sat within the Bush administration, stating bluntly that the question of Israel’s security required that Saddam Hussein go. The Israeli paper Ha’aretz reported in February of 2001 that then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “believes that Iraq poses more of a threat to regional stability than Iran, due to the errant, irresponsible behaviour of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Ex-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, appearing on CNN in May 2002, said that “Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden” and the US “cannot sit and wait” while he builds a nuclear arsenal. In June 2002, another ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post declaring that the Bush regime “should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein. Once he is gone there will be a different Arab world.” Next, in August 2002, then-Prime Minister Sharon told a key committee of the Knesset that Iraq “is the greatest danger facing Israel.” Yet another ex-Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Case for Toppling Saddam.”

All of which leads to the current Israel lobby/neo-con media campaign aimed at demonizing Iran. The pro-Israel neo-con intelligentsia went on the attack. Michael Rubin, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Perle and Joshua Muravchik, all militants with various pro-Israeli think tanks, media outlets and inside the Bush administration, each published pro-war pieces. The title of the May 2007 op-ed piece Podhoretz wrote for the Wall Street Journal gives one the sense of where these thinkers are coming from: “The Case for Bombing Iran: I Hope and Pray That Bush Will Do It.” The Iraq Study Group’s report “produced an outpouring of protest from Jewish groups opposing its call for talks with Iran, Syria and the Palestinians,” according to the pro-Israeli newspaper, Forward.

In mid-March 2007, the authors recount the efforts of members of Congress “to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President Bush to get its approval before attacking Iran,” a modest attempt to exert some control on the Imperial Presidency. AIPAC lobbied against it, together with a trio of congresspeople. The provision was removed. When asked the reason for the removal, Congressman Michael Capuano answered with one word, “AIPAC.”