So Israel’s war against Hezbollah has failed. After a month of barbaric bombing that has left over 1,000 Lebanese dead and an estimated one million homeless, Israel has failed to beat one of its arch enemies. Instead Hezbollah’s reputation has been “lionised across the Arab world”, according to veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk of the Independent. Israel’s defeat leaves US policy in the region in tatters, for Israel’s attack on Hezbollah was meant to be a dry run for an American strike against Iran.

Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East is now essentially identical and working in tandem. According to another veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the New Yorker this weekend that even before Hezbollah had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, Israel officials had visited Washington “to get a green light for the bombing operation.”

They share the same language. Speaking at the start of the recent conflict, Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert called Hamas and Hezbollah “nothing but ‘sub-contractors’ operating under the inspiration, permission, instigation and financing of the terror-sponsoring and peace-rejecting regimes, on the Axis of Evil which stretches from Tehran to Damascus”. The words could have come out of Bush’s mouth, but they were Olmert’s.

The two countries have close financial and military ties. Israel receives a far greater proportion of US aid than any other country: around $3 billion a year. The US has also provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and gives it access to cutting-edge military technology such as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Israel has been allowed to develop nuclear weapons even though it has not signed the United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Since the early eighties, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions that were critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council member. In the midst of the current crisis, the Pentagon announced the export of $210m of aviation fuel to help Israel “keep peace and security in the region”.

But Israel’s position - backed by the US - does not promote peace. Earlier this year in a controversial article in the London Review of Books, two American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a critique of US foreign policy. They caused a political storm because the article raised what many saw as an unspoken taboo – how intertwined America’s foreign policy was with Israel, even if that policy was not ultimately in America’s interests. 

In the article, entitled "The Israel Lobby," they argued that: “For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel”. This “unwavering” support for Israel “had inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history”. If it had no equal before 2001, since September 11th 2001 the two sides have got even closer.

In February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation as “Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy”. The following year, the former US national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft said Sharon had Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger.’

 “Why” asked the two academics, Mearsheimer and Walt “has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?” The answer lies with what they called the “Israel Lobby” in Washington; an all-powerful coalition of vested interested that includes politicians, neoconservatives, journalists and the key lobby organization, AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The academics argued that whereas “other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical”.

Let us look in more detail at AIPAC, the most powerful part of the “Israel Lobby”. Polls have repeatedly found that it is the second most powerful lobby group in Washington.  Indeed, Ariel Sharon once said: “when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: Help AIPAC."

The former Israeli Ambassador to Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, says that Israel’s relationship with America, in which AIPAC is crucial, is Israel’s most potent weapon after its military arsenal. President Bush himself acknowledges that “AIPAC is one of the reasons why” the US and Israel are such “steadfast allies.” 

AIPAC’s political clout is legendary. Through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress, AIPAC helps pass more than 100 pro-Israel legislative initiatives a year. Its Annual Dinner is Washington institution in itself. At the dinner this year it took twenty seven minutes to list all the names of politicians and diplomats in attendance,

Its supporters include many senior neo-conservatives such as Bush himself; Dick Cheney, the Vice President; Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State; Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the World Bank; John Bolton, the controversial US Ambassador to the UN and ex-speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, an influential Republican insider.

AIPAC funds pro-Israeli political candidates through the contributions of its members and various Political Action Committees. If you are pro-Israeli you get funded, if you are seen as pro-Arab your opponents get funded. The result is a Congress extremely supportive of AIPAC.  

William Quandt, a member of the National Security Council in the Nixon and Carter administrations says simply: "Seventy to 80 percent of all members of Congress will go along with whatever they think AIPAC wants." It is no wonder that Mearsheimer and Walt concluded that “The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress.”

This stranglehold has meant that AIPAC was instrumental in pushing America to war against Saddam Hussein, and pushing for action against Hamas and Hezbollah. It will be instrumental in keeping the relationship between America and Israel as close as ever over the current conflict in the Middle East. It will be instrumental in widening the conflict to include Iran and Syria.

In the current conflict AIPAC defends Israel’s actions uncritically. In relation to Hamas, AIPAC argues that Israel has taken “measured steps to protect its civilians”. Note the word “measured”. In contrast, the well-respected aid agencies Save the Children, Christian Aid and Oxfam International have warned of an “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, due to the lack of power, water and sanitation facilities, all caused by Israel’s military campaign.

“Ordinary Palestinians are suffering from the destruction of bridges, water pipelines and electricity supplies - all things that civilians are entitled to and depend upon,” says Adam Leach, the regional Director from Oxfam. “People’s basic rights are being denied - this does nothing to secure a just and lasting peace in the region.”

AIPAC defends Israel’s action against Hezbollah. In Lebanon, AIPAC says that Israel’s “response is being carefully calibrated to effectively carry out the mission to rescue the kidnapped soldiers and to degrade the rocket capabilities of Hezbollah”.

This is not true. Israel’s ultimate objective is to change the political nature of the Middle East. Tom Hayden is a veteran American political activist. “What I fear” says Hayden “is that the ‘Israeli lobby’ is working overtime to influence American public opinion on behalf of Israel’s military effort to ‘roll back the clock’ and ‘change the map’ of the region, going far beyond issues like prisoner exchange. What I fear is the rehabilitation of the discredited U.S. neoconservative agenda to ignite a larger war against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.”

This is exactly what neo-conservatives are now advocating. AIPAC supporter, Newt Gingrich likens what is happening in the Middle East as “World War Three”, and says that an Iran-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas “terrorist alliance” is waging war against Israel. It is, he argues, part of a “world wide campaign against civilization and the rule of law”. He says the West needs to have “collective courage to defeat terrorists and, if necessary, terrorist states”. What Gingrich is saying is that he believes that Syria and Iran are part of a terrorist alliance and they must be defeated. 

The Israeli lobby and its neo-conservative friends in Washington are playing an extremely dangerous game which could completely destabilise the Middle East and beyond. However, often in the West if you criticise Israel you are labelled an anti-Semite. In their essay on Israel, Mearsheimer and Walt concluded that “Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.” They were vilified for being anti-Semitic and were even called Neo-Nazis.

At the risk of being vilified, I join the growing voices that are questioning the “Israel Lobby”, its funding, its methods and its influence on US politics. After witnessing the events in Lebanon, silence is no longer an option.