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Why does the United States support Israel so strongly when that support appears to violate American national interests? In their recent book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue that Israel is of little strategic value to American interests and that the moral case for supporting Israel is weak at best. They then argue that this apparent distortion in American foreign policy is due to the extraordinary influence of pro-Israel groups and individuals--a collection of actors they dub the "Israel lobby"--in American domestic politics. 1 Not surprisingly, this book and the article that preceded it have provoked a great deal of criticism, as well as a fair amount of praise, focused largely on the merits of the book's foreign-policy argument. 2 Much less attention has been paid, however, to their core argument, which consists of a set of causal claims about American politics and policymaking. In this article I examine this argument and conclude that the case for an "Israel lobby" as the primary cause of American support for Israel, although it points to a number of interesting questions about the mechanisms of power in American politics, is weak at best.
I treat Mearsheimer and Walt's work as an exercise in the study of American politics, in which they attempt to mount an argument about the reasons for a particular set of American policy choices and the possible influence of an interest group in guiding those choices in the context of American policymaking institutions. My focus is exclusively on this part of their argument, and not on their assessment of American foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East. I ask three sets of questions about their argument. First, what, exactly, are their causal claims? By what mechanisms do they suggest that pro-Israel individuals and organizations influence policy outcomes? What are their hypotheses about the forces that shape American policy toward the Middle East? Second, what does political science have to say about these mechanisms? Many of the political processes that Mearsheimer and Walt discuss have, of course, been the subject of extensive research by scholars of American politics. What guidance can the discipline's state-of-the-art knowledge about policymaking in the American political...