The below is a slightly edited version of an email reply to "The Power of the Israel Lobby" by Kathleen and Bill Christison. Their essay, a defence of the Mearsheimer-Walt study on "The Israel Lobby", was a response to certain left wing critiques of that study:

Thanks for your very interesting and well-argued essay, "The Power of the Israel Lobby". Although The Ideological Times adheres to a leftist perspective, it quite some time ago parted ways with what one might call "the Chomskyian thesis", which assumes a general correspondence between the objective foreign policy needs of the US "elite" and the actual policies carried out by that section of the elite that happens to exercise governing power at a given point in time, such that this thesis seeks to explain and fit every event within such assumptions. That is not how things actually happen in the real world, for although history is by definition determined, the future can only be determined as a probabilistic set of outcomes, not all of which, and not even the most probabilistic of them, could be assumed to be congruent with the objective interests of the entity in question, whether that be a nation, its ruling elite, or the mass of its people - each of which, taken separately, have very different objective interests.

That said, I would like to point you attention to parts of several key passages in your essay:

"In the clamor over the Mearsheimer-Walt study, critics on both the left and the right have tended to ignore the slow evolutionary history of U.S. Middle East policymaking and of the U.S. relationship with Israel...."

and

"...Wilson would not have supported the Zionist enterprise to the extent he did had it not been for the influence of Zionist colleagues like Louis Brandeis.."

Indeed, Brandeis, the great liberal democrat of the old-fashioned, 19th century, "Jeffersonian Republican" sort, is little noted in the history books as the founding father - virtually single-handedly - of what we can call an indigenous American Zionism - note the italics - at a time when Jews, by coming to the United States, were in practice voting with their feet in rejection of the Zionist project. That is why Zionism held a marginal influence within American Jewry until fairly recently, and even now there remains the significant political divergence between - to put it mildly - the rather "hard right" politics of American Zionism together with its Christian fundamentalist and populist-racist American allies - both within the "elite" and the people - and those of the relatively liberal American Jewish community. Brandeis, though, pioneered the democratic populist tendency within the Zionist movement, at that time very much still in the mold of European-style "Labor Zionism", that in time would eventually emerge as the political hegemony of the Likud Party in Israel (surely to the horror of Brandeis had he been alive, but a superb example of what is mentioned in the first paragraph above), and of the so-called American neocon-Zionist "Likudist" nexus within the larger reactionary populist "Reagan Coalition" of the same time. This latter, of course, has turned out to be an important "developmental stage" in the evolution of an indigenous American Zionism that prepared it to assume hegemonic power in a governing coalition of its own making under GW Bush. More on this, below.

"The U.S.-Israeli bond has always had its grounding more in soft emotions than in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Scholars have always described the tie in almost spiritual terms never applied to ties with other nations. A Palestinian-French scholar has described the United States' pro-Israeli tilt as a "predisposition," a natural inclination that precedes any consideration of interest or of cost. Israel, he said, takes part in the very "being" of American society and therefore participates in its integrity and its defense.....Other scholars of varying political inclinations have described a similar spiritual and cultural identity: the U.S. identifies with Israel's "national style"; Israel is essential to the "ideological prospering" of the U.S.; each country has "grafted" the heritage of the other onto itself."

"This is no ordinary state-to-state relationship, and the lobby does not function like any ordinary lobby."

Yes, indeed, there ane instances where "soft emotions" are able to transform themselves into "hard geopolitical facts" - emotional facts on the ground, so to speak in the language of Zionism. Then why not come to the logical conclusion that the entities we call the United States and Israel are in precisely hard geopolitical fact identical, and that it is redundant at best and misleading at worst to describe as the exercise of a "foreign" lobbying influence what is evidently a coming into power of the most highly organized, focused and determined American political faction within the present ruling regime, that one might even describe as the most militant "Bolshevik vanguard" of its class? Now this opens up the really interesting question, the one of course that the theses on an "Israel Lobby" really seek to explain: aside from its own political determination, how was this particular faction able to move into the centers of executive power in the US?

"The claimed interchangeability of U.S. and Israeli interests ­ and the fact that certain individuals for whom a primary objective is to advance Israel's interests now reside inside the councils of government ­ proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt's principal conclusion that the lobby has been able to convince most Americans, contrary to reality, that there is an essential identity of U.S. and Israeli interests and that the lobby has succeeded for this reason in forging a relationship of unmatched intimacy."

The question is, contrary to whose reality, that of the American people, or that of the ruling American elite? The suggestion is a real identity between elites, where the American elite has no other answer to the many growing problems of maintaining America's uniquely privileged place in the world as it has know it since the end of World War 2 than to defiantly comport itself as a sort of Global Israel.

"The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged U.S. interests ­ that is, not what should be real U.S. national interests, but the selfish and self-defined "national interests" of the political-corporate-military complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the U.S. government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the U.S. /and/ of Israel ­ groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy."

A crucial shift has taken place in the Christison argument, where the combination of US and Israeli interests congeal into a single "political-corporate-military complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties" and "have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy". Ah, shades of Chomsky! So it is not a mere Israel Lobby after all but, perhaps unwittingly, something much closer to the perspectives of The Ideological Times, and the point of antagonism now shifts to one between "real national interests" and that of "The Complex", or as we might describe it, the ruling political regime.

"Real" American interests are of course those of the American people, and as a people, that objective interest - "self-evident truths" certain Americans once called them - is to live in peace with the rest of the world on the basis of mutual respect and equality - "with a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" Americans once said a long time ago. But unfortunately that is not the manner in which the American people and economy are presently living in relation to the rest of the world. Rather, the real tragedy is that relation has become an increasingly parasitic and predatory one, exemplified by, among too many indications to account for here, as it would require a book to cantain them, the ever ballooning foreign trade and government deficits and increasing dependence upon truly "foreign" capital, not certainly from Israel, but from East Asia, to fund its economic and governmental activities. But these indications crucially involve the very stuff of the "American Way of Life", and it was of course the notoriously militant Dick Cheney who announced to the world, in the fashion of an ultra-leftist '60's college radical seizing occupation of the campus administration building, that this way of life was "non-negotiable".

Of course it is negotiable and in fact the American people will have no alternative in the future but to radically renegotiate their way of living in relation to the rest of the world and at last rejoin the human race as human beings, and cease living the dream of the "Manifest" Elect of God. But that would require at a minimum a thorough-going political revolution that would mean the end of the existing regime of elites such as Cheney, and that of course cannot be countenanced. That is "not an option", as we are repeatedly reminded in the case of Iraq.

But since the latter Clinton years, when a certain aimless drift took hold among the American policy elite at large, the specter of the end to their own "way of life" as a governing elite has loomed a bit closer as none of the "traditional" factions - especially those contained within that most traditional of parties, the Democratic Party - could develop any coherent ideological vision or political program of action to address the growing legion of problems that threatened to undermine America's and their own position in the world. 9/11, whose true meaning lies in its exposure before the American people of the bankruptcy of US imperialism, all in one blinding flash, was the defining moment that crystallized that drift into a real paralysis. As the policy paralysis set in, it was precisely into that political vacuum that the the most determined of factions, led on by "visions of Zion", could with ease seize the central levers of power, confident that if only they would do so - to paraphrase Richard Perle - "the rest would follow".

So far, Mr. Perle has been proven correct.

"Tehran Splits the Israel Lobby" : I would agree with the general thrust of 'babak's post: As against the much hyped and overrated views of Walt-Mearsheimer, it is a fundamental misreading of the alignments among the imperialist (international) ruling classes to portray organizations such as AIPAC - and by imputation Zionism or neoconservativism as political movements - as a lobby of a "foreign power". Pursuing this misreading leads to overplaying certain distinctions between various ruling class factions to the point of believing that there may be differences of real significance rather than simple tactical manuvers between groups that are generally tightly bound up with one another out of necessity.

To see the situation more clearly, we need to first ask ourselves, is the State of Israel truly an "independent foreign country"? The test for independence is this: how long would the State of Israel continue to exist, let alone continue with its highly aggressive policies of present, without the massive aid and support of both the USA and to a lesser extent Western Europe, both at the state level and in terms of the relatively privileged position of Israel in the global market structure?

Not very long, and no, hundreds of nuclear warheads would not save the State of Israel from rapid extinction.

This explains why the State of Israel is so tightly bound to the USA - since the 1973 war, which Israel almost lost save for the intervention of the US, the Israeli section of the American constellation of imperialist ruling classes has had to accept annexation as the "external section" of an American ruling class faction.

This annexation took place from the Israeli side by means of the rise of the Likud movement, which marked a sharp and decisive break from the European traditions of "labor" Zionism towards that of a typically American democratic populist movement - and going into the historical conjuncture of the Reagan era, a profoundly reactionary democratic populism at that.
The general result then was the complete absorbsion of the old European Zionist movement into the mainstream of American ruling class politics and ideology, in the form of what we could call American Zionism, a homegrown American ideology and movement as American as the proverbial apple pie. Its global center was to be found, not within some small Middle East state with a regional monopoly of nuclear weaponry, but naturally in the centers of power within the United States, whose axis has always been and still remains the Northeast corridor from New York to Washington D.C., the seats of American financial and political power respectively. This is true not because, as some such as Max Sawicky of LBO would have you believe, therein lives "a lotta Jews", but because, well, last we heard, a lot of Americans happen to live there.

This transformation and annexation of the historical Zionist movement could be performed with relative ease, as the Americans themselves rather famously chased after a Zion of their own making, probably best know under the rubric of "Manifest Destiny", but with roots tracing through the Puritans 'New Jerusalem' in New England back to the Protestent republicanism of the English Revolution. Inspired by their reading of both Machievellian Roman Republican neoclassicism and the representative organization of the Biblical Hebraic tribes as a mass movement in arms - both expansive imageries, needless to say - the revolutionary millieu of which the Puritans were a key part saw England as a country "Elect of God" destined to found a new republican empire of an agrarian people in arms that would spread across the North Atlantic. (Aside: Giving our theological poster a run for his money, no)

With this background in mind, it is easy to see how this vision lives on today in the grandiose ideological fantasies of what we call the "neocons", but they are but the tip of the American iceberg. Or, to use an "old fasioned" expression, "neoconism" is in the vanguard of the ruling class. "Neoconism" simply expresses in highly concentrated form what every American has drilled into them in school and out from kindergarten on. Is it any wonder then that such a narrow "cabal" exercises such a wide influence over the American political scene, capable at one point in 2003 in capturing the allegances of 60% of the American population, according to polls at that time measuring support for GW Bush's policies. As well the hegemonic influence of American Zionism encompasses virtually the entire active "mainstream" of American ruling class politics, from Cheney, GW Bush and the Congressional Far Right to McCain, Rice, Clinton, Kerry and the entire leadeship of the Democratic Party, together with leading corporate media outlets ranging from the Far Right FOX outfit to NPR. Moreover, through this hegemonic influence the "mainstream" is united with the "extreme" Right, variously in the form of a highly organized fundamentalist Christian Zionist mass movement and a diffuse, motley populist mass of Arab and Muslim hating racists. In such a broad mix the American Jewish community organizations, including the State of Israel - which after all is a self described "Jewish community organization" with guns and nukes - all play a relatively marginal role.

Far from being the result of a "foreign lobby" that somehow managed to capture the central levers of political power and thereby exercise an enormous influence over an otherwise "normal" American political scene, what we have is a phenomenon emerged straight from the heart of "America" and mistook in typically alienated American fashion for a "foreign power". But that foreign, alien power is ideological "America" itself, the unselfdiscovered America.

But why has American Zionism assumed its stark profile in our own times? For this, one has to scrape through the patina of American ideology to reveal the ongoing and deepening crisis of the USA's mode of existence in the world today, both in terms of its relations with other states as well as its mode of integration into the global economy. That vastly interesting field of analysis is beyond the scope of this commentary, but suffice to say that the result of this crisis process has been to render Israel as a very appealing model for how the USA must make its way in the future, if it wishes to preserve its increasingly threatened and isolated position in the world, and therefore the position of ruling American regime within the USA, one might add. "America" as a Global Israel, a Blight Unto The Nations.

Therein lies the secret of the power and influence of the so-called "neocons". Contrary to present appearances, it is a power and influence that have every promise of growing as the "crisis of America" - of US imperialism - deepens.

Finally, as to the recent manuvers of Rice and GW Bush in relation to Iran, the answer is more straightforward. These were caused, not by splits with American ranks, but by splits beween nations on the global scene: The failure of the USA to get a punitive sanctions resolution out of the Security Council that could be brandished in Teheran's face. It is a failure of US imperialism, a failure of hegemonic leadership and a failure of its relations with respect to Russia and China in particular.

In the face of failure there was no alternative but to beat a (temporary, they hope) retreat to buy time and regroup for another attempt at launching aggressive war. US imperialism today has no other option.