...For all its attention to American foreign policy and domestic lawmaking, The Israel Lobby operates more deeply as a theology, a belief system. The original sin, in the Mearsheimer-Walt cosmology, is the United States' support for Israel, which they view as the root cause of global instability, Islamist terrorism and American insecurity. To enter into this faith is to accept the premise that a shifting, stealthy, protoplasmic group of Zionists, most of them Jews but some evangelical Christians, have for decades manipulated the puppet strings of Congress and the White House.

The Israel lobby's "loose coalition of individuals and organizations" has not simply steered the United States into a self-destructive and staggeringly expensive bond with Israel, a "strategic liability." It has pushed America into the Iraq war, alienated us from Western European allies, ruined rapprochement with Syria and begun greasing the way for a military strike against Iran.

Like some other critics of the American-Israeli relationship -- the historian Tony Judt, former President Jimmy Carter -- Mearsheimer and Walt perceive themselves as speaking a previously unutterable truth, a truth so shattering in its clarity that powerful forces seek to muzzle it. The more voices are raised against them, the more convinced they are of their own rightness and persecution.

But, of course, there is nothing very new in what these two scholars say about the pervasive, hidden power of Jews, that convenient euphemism. Mearsheimer and Walt assure readers that the Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy, that it is perfectly acceptable for special-interest groups to advocate for their causes and that they categorically reject such anti-Semitic evergreens as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It may not be fair to hold any writer responsible for his or her audience. But it is impossible to plow through this book without feeling certain that Mearsheimer and Walt have provided required reading for Jew-haters worldwide. Their credentials in the academic establishment -- and, indeed, the imprimatur of their publisher -- supply intellectual legitimacy to a blatantly slanted, inherently biased worldview...