Prospect’s new issue – A liberal Israel lobby?

One of the most poisonous debates in American politics in recent years has been the question of whether an “Israel lobby” distorts American foreign policy in the middle east. Two years ago, the American foreign policy “realists” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published a controversial article on this theme in the London Review of Books, which they later turned into a book. Their thesis was that America’s “unwavering support” for Israel, which jeopardised its own security and that of its allies, was the result of an Israel Lobby (the capitalisation was theirs) that exercised significant…