“The billionaire investor George Soros has added his voice to a heated but little-noticed debate over the role of Israel’s powerful lobby in shaping Washington policy ”

“Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC’s 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. “It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States,” he said in a keynote speech.”

“Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the U.S. publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.

It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.”

“Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that it not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November, stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.”

“”This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. “It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine.”

According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same “insidious thesis” and suffered from the same flaw — ignoring oil as a driving element in U.S. policies on the Middle East.”