Outgoing Harvard president Lawrence Summers made a key distinction a few years back in addressing the fine line between anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism. “Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities,” said Summers. “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.”

The latest progressive intellectual community to be infected by profoundly anti-Israel views is Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The school has released an 83-page diatribe, written by Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer, about the insidious influence of the pro-Israel lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer — sort of a Woodward and Bernstein for the Chomsky crowd — suggest the United States repeatedly acts against its own interests in Iraq, on oil policy, and in the war on terror in order to “advance the interests of another state.” That state is Israel, of course. “[T]he thrust of U.S. policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby,’” they write. “Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest....”

You get it? It’s not that the vast majority of Americans consistently tell pollsters that they support a Jewish democracy in the Middle East because it reflects their political and religious values. It’s not that lawmakers in states with negligible Jewish populations still feel committed to the claims of Israel over pressure from Big Oil. No, it has to be the “intimidation” tactics of Israel and its allies.

The contention that Israel’s supporters — okay, Jews — manipulate mighty governments has been the great unifying theory of conspiracy theorists since the days of the pharaohs. “Serious and thoughtful people” need to convey to the author’s sponsors that such views are beyond the pale.

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