“The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security. … Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?… The explanation lies in the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. Were it not for the Lobby’s ability to manipulate the American political system, the relationship between Israel and the United States would be far less intimate than it is today…. AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress…. manipulating the media… Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element….the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel…Viewed objectively, Israel’s past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians…Israel and its American supporters want the United States to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape U.S. policy succeed, …Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying.”

Sound like the rantings of President Ahmadinejad of Iran or Louisiana anti-Semite David Duke? It turns out that those are selections from a paper issued this month by the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government in its “Faculty Research Working Papers Series” and written by two American professors, Stephen M. Walt and John Mearsheimer. The paper, posted on the Internet, is starting to attract attention not only because of its substance but because of the affiliations of the authors. Mr. Walt is the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, a graduate school for students preparing for careers in public service. He also holds the Robert and Renee Belfer professorship in international affairs at the Kennedy School. Mr. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.

Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt go out of their way to condemn anti-Semitism, but with their references to this mysterious “Lobby,” their accusation that it is an agent of Israel manipulating the press and the political system, they are flirting with stereotypes that have historically been deadly. They claim that invoking anti-Semitism only chills debate, so we’ll put that question aside for now, though it will be interesting to see how Jewish donors and professors of these universities react to these charges along with the rest of American Jewry.

What we’re struck with, as much as the professors’ investment in the classic stereotypes, is the weakness of their argument. If the Islamists only hate America because of our support for Israel, why are they setting off bombs in Indonesia and Spain, which are hardly in the vanguard of support for Israel? How would abandoning Israel assuage the angry Islamists rather than encouraging them to press on to completing their end goal of making all of America subject to Islamic law? Why do the actions of the so-called Israel lobby – AIPAC is an American organization of Americans – constitute manipulation worthy of an 83-page paper, while the extensive lobbying activities of Saudi Arabia and its allies in the petroleum industry merit hardly a mention, let alone condemnation? Might the “critical element” in the decision to go to war in Iraq not have been the manipulative “Lobby” but rather the attacks of September 11, 2001? And how to account for the participation in the Iraq war of foreign allies such as Poland, where the “Israel Lobby” is essentially nonexistent? Israel’s allies in America have no fear of debate on any of these points because they have by far the better of the arguments on the merits.