Mearsheimer and Walt on the Israel lobby

There is some debate in academic circles of American support for Israel.
This is in contrast to the US political scene where support of Israel is sacrosanct and Hamas and Hezbollah are invariably labeled as terrorist without any acknowledgement of the fact that both organizations are democratically elected and have been the targets of massive Israeli terror.
This is an excerpt from a front page story that ran in the New York Time on November 13 about Israel and America.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/world/middleeast/13israel.html
But Mr. Zelikow's close ties to Ms. Rice are well known, and the furor over his comments was amplified because they appeared to some to echo criticisms published in March in The London Review of Books by two American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_chicago/index.html?inline=nyt-org> and Stephen M. Walt of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
They suggested that from the White House to Capitol Hill, Israel's interests have been confused with America's, that Israel is more of a security burden than an asset and that the "Israel lobby" in America, including Jewish policy makers, have an undue influence over American foreign policy. In late August, appearing in front of an Islamic group in Washington, Mr.
Mearsheimer extended the argument to say that American support of the war in Lebanon had been another example of Israeli interests trumping American ones.
The essay argued that without the Israel lobby the United States would not have gone to war in Iraq and implied that the same forces could drag the United States into another military confrontation on Israel's behalf, with Iran. It urged more American pressure to solve the Palestinian question as the best cure for regional instability.
Some Israelis worried that the implicit charge of dual loyalty would be underlined by the trial of two former officials of the prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, on charges of receiving classified information about Iran and other issues from a Defense Department official and passing it on to a journalist and an Israeli diplomat. The trial is scheduled to begin early next year.
Mr. Walt, in an interview, argued that the first President Bush had worked to restrain Israel, and that Mr. Clinton worked to attain diplomatic concessions to achieve a peace. But when this Bush administration took office, "they first had no use for the Mideast, then took a more balanced position, calling for a two-state solution, and then were completely won over by Israel's argument that it is simply fighting terrorism."