By host Tom Ashbrook:

A-list scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer are out with a new book that has sparked furious denunciation. It’s called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” It says the deep U.S. embrace of Israel is no longer in America’s national interest, but goes on anyway because of a sprawling, well-funded, well-placed world of pro-Israel lobbyists. It says that lobby drove the U.S. to war in Iraq.

These are incendiary charges. The authors have been denounced as sloppy, defamatory, and anti-Semitic. They’ve also been credited with airing a tough issue.

This hour On Point: Walt and Mearsheimer make their case and former chief Mideast envoy Dennis Ross pushes back.

Guests:

Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and co-author, with John Mearsheimer, of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”;
John Mearsheimer, professor of political science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago

Dennis Ross, Middle East envoy for presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, currently a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World” (2007)

Aaron David Miller, advisor to six U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, currently a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and author of the forthcoming “America and the Much Too Promised Land: The Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace”