But wait. Isn't AIPAC the one that is in the business of intimidation? "The lobby has gone to considerable lengths to shape public discourse about Israel by putting pressure on the media and academia and by establishing a tangible presence in influential foreign policy think tanks," Mearsheimer and Walt insist. "Efforts to shape public perceptions often include charging critics of Israel with anti-Semitism." The publication of their article in the London Review of Books certainly provoked controversy. It was designed to provoke controversy. But our heroes' skin proved too thin for controversy. Though they were extensively praised in Europe, where everybody is of course much saner because they are beyond AIPAC's reach, Mearsheimer and Walt experienced a good deal of withering criticism in America. (And also some fair, even generous coverage here, including a credulous Washington Post Magazine cover story about their work.) And yet their ideas have been widely debated and discussed. And yet they received a dizzying advance to turn their essay into this book. And yet their book is already a best-seller.

They claim that they themselves are victims of the pro-Israel lobby, but the existence of their book, and the sensation that attends it, rather negates their self-pity. I mean, somehow The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy slipped past the lobby. When I visited Amazon.com to check the book's ranking a few weeks ago--it was at number thirty five--I learned that customers who bought it also purchased The Power of Israel in the United States; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; They Dare Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby; and of course Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. So there is a literature of this sort, and a market for it. And yet in their own minds--this is the comic dimension of this sad story--Mearsheimer and Walt are dissidents. They portray themselves, and the many American critics of the pro-Israel lobby, as free-speech martyrs. In this way the fellows at number thirty-five resemble their idol Jimmy Carter, who complained about being muzzled even as his book was climbing the best- seller lists. They seem to think that anybody who disagrees with what they say is denying their right to say it. The truth is that most of Mearsheimer and Walt's critics do not want to suppress their ideas. They merely want to refute them.

The pro-Israel lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt contend, goes to any length to steer media coverage in Israel's favor: "If the media were left to their own devices, they would not serve up as consistent a diet of pro-Israel coverage and commentary." And whose devices, precisely, are they left up to? We are awfully close to the Elders of Z. here. Mearsheimer and Walt's opinion that the press in America is robotically pro-Israel only betrays their ignorance of the American press. They are apparently unacquainted with the work of the editorial boards of, say, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. They might recall the life and work of the late Peter Jennings. They identify such columnists as Richard Cohen of The Washington Post and Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times as Israeli sympathizers, which is true in the sense that Cohen and Friedman do not support the murder of Israeli civilians or the extinction of the Israeli state. But when Friedman's words suit their own tendency, when he writes critically of Israeli policy, they cite him. So Friedman is an agent of Israeli interests, except when he is not. At his Politics and Prose talk, Walt said that American columnists represent a narrow spectrum of opinion on Israel. "If you look at punditry in the U.S., there's no equivalent of a Robert Fisk or a Patrick Seale," he said. This is true, but I cannot lament the loss. Patrick Seale is the court biographer of the Assad family, and the author of a book that identifies Abu Nidal, a mass murderer of Jews, as an Israeli agent; and Robert Fisk is a rabid anti-Zionist who has lately made common cause with the September 11 conspiracy movement.