James Petras The Power of Israel in the United States

Annotation

Following in the wake of the controversial paper by Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, this work by Petras (emeritus, sociology, State U. of New York at Binghamton) takes up the same topic with less restraint and a greater willingness to criticize Israeli crimes, US enabling of them, and the lobby that he views as substantially responsible for that enabling. Among the topics he explores the role of pro-Israel officials and journalists in the United States in taking the country into the disastrous war with Iraq, the role of the US in backing Israeli ethnocide in the Palestinian Occupied Territories and in attacking Lebanon, the arena of psychological warfare in which Israeli and Israel lobby "terror experts" who "project the violence of the executioners onto the victims," and an alternative explanation of the phenomenon of suicide bombers. Of particular interest to leftist critics of US policy towards Israel/Palestine will be the chapter in which Petras seeks to refute Noam Chomsky's dismissal of the power of the lobby.