Here's an irony for you. Two prominent American academics, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, have just expanded a lengthy article that they published last year into a brand-new book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, assailing the pro-Israel lobby for skewing American foreign policy making and consequently jeopardizing American national security.

According to their thesis, this lobby is so extraordinarily powerful - "No [other] ethnic lobby has diverted that policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest" - that its dominance was critical in forcing the US into Iraq. Its influence is so overwhelming that the US dare not press Israel to change its reprehensible policies on the Palestinians. Because of its power, and despite Israel's lack of moral standing, the US sustains a partnership with Israel that is prompting terrorism against American and other targets. The lobby's sway is so vast that critics are silenced and hostile politicians constrained.

And with its commitment to Israeli interests over American, this "Israel Lobby" has badly undermined US relations with Iran for the past 15 years, destroying the possibility of constructive dialogue and leaving the US to contemplate going to war against Teheran - an option that simply would not be on the table were it not for the malevolent lobby. After all, the authors reason, "Iran has even offered to put its nuclear program up for negotiation and offered to work out a modus vivendi with Israel. Yet despite these promising opportunities, Israel and the lobby have worked overtime to prevent both the Clinton and Bush administrations from engaging Iran, and they have prevailed at almost every turn."

Perceptive critics have already blasted gaping holes in much of this misconceived argument. Abraham Foxman of the ADL has devoted much of a book of his own - The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control - to demolishing the new volume and the duo's previous writings. He describes the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis as a "classic conspiratorial analysis" and argues that since their scholarship is "riddled with errors" that tend to slant it "in the exact same direction, we are dealing not with a little unfortunate carelessness but with a culpable degree of bias."

While effectively countering the central assertion of pro-Israeli interests managing to persuade American governments to act against their own sense of US interests, Foxman worries that "one of the most unprofessional works of scholarship ever to emanate from supposedly respectable quarters" will be cited by "the anti-Israel forces and the avowed bigots... for a long time to come."

I checked a single quotation to gauge the merit of Foxman's assertion of partiality - in a passage where the authors fault Israel for the failure of the 2000 Camp David attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. They cite Ehud Barak's foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami telling an interviewer, years later, "If I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David, as well." What they do not find room for is the continuation of Ben-Ami's comments in the same interview, when he expresses his conviction that the Clinton parameters for peace represented "the point of equilibrium between the negotiating positions of the parties" and overall faults Arafat for having "lost the opportunity of having a deal that is imperfect, inevitably imperfect, will always be imperfect, because this is the way peace processes are done all over, and he sent his nation into the wilderness of war and back in the time machine to the core of the conflict."

The authors find no need, either, to cite senior Arafat aide Nabil Amr's subsequent open letter to Arafat, publicly assailing him for having rejected the opportunity of a deal with the Barak government, nor even the ascription of blame to Arafat for the failure by Clinton, the man who, after all, had hosted the attempt at peacemaking.

Meanwhile David Remnick, in The New Yorker, while accepting the duo's description of "moral violation in Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands" and defending them against charges of anti-Semitism and racism, nonetheless castigates them for what he calls their portrayal of Israel as "a singularly pernicious force in world affairs."

He is particularly resonant in deflating their depiction of Israel's purported unwillingness to solve the Palestinian problem as the root cause of jihadi terror, faulting them for having produced a narrative "that recounts every lurid report of Israeli cruelty as indisputable fact but leaves out the rise of Fatah and Palestinian terrorism before 1967; the Munich Olympics; Black September; myriad cases of suicide bombings; and other spectaculars." For these authors, he snipes, "It doesn't matter that Israel and the Palestinians were in peace negotiations in 1993, the year of the first attack on the World Trade Center, or that during the Camp David negotiations in 2000 bin Laden's pilots were training in Florida."

In short, he scoffs, "Mearsheimer and Walt give you the sense that, if the Israelis and the Palestinians come to terms, bin Laden will return to the family construction business."

The facts are, furthermore, that for all that Walt and Mearsheimer would have their readers believe otherwise, the Arab world has indeed fought a series of wars aimed at destroying Israel; terrorism for Israel is considerably more than, as they put it, "clearly a problem"; a nuclear Iran truly is an existential danger; Arafat chose not to cut a viable deal seven years ago; the US would pressure Israel to give ground if it felt that a genuine Palestinian peace partner was being ignored; Islamic extremists would be targeting the West and targeting Arab countries even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were resolved; Israel doesn't even know what its own policy should be on Syria, much less skew America's; Israel seeks to minimize the civilian casualties when hitting back at enemies north, south and east who strive to maximize our civilian losses - and no amount of cherry-picked, selectively quoted comments from public figures and analysts will change any of those realities.