By Tony Czuczka Mar 10, 2007, 2:43 GMT
Washington - After a sustained attack by critics including former US president Jimmy Carter, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the US still boasts impressive political pull in Washington.
When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) opens its annual conference Sunday, a high-powered group of politicians, academics and policy analysts - more than 6,000 people in all - is expected to pack the capital's glassy convention centre.
US Vice President Dick Cheney is due to give a keynote speech Monday stressing strong ties with Israel. The top four leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties will also speak, underscoring the tradition of bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress.
'There's one issue - that is, support for the US relationship with Israel - that brings everyone together,' AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said.
AIPAC says the three-day conference will be its biggest ever - a signal of self-confidence and, in its own way, a rebuttal of unusually harsh questioning of the Israel lobby's influence.
Two US political scientists sparked a furious debate last spring with an essay that portrayed Washington as slavishly devoted to Israel and accused US President George W Bush's administration of launching the war in Iraq to help Israeli interests.
Harvard professor Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's Walter Mearsheimer said their paper, published in the London Review of Books, aimed to bring a largely taboo topic into the open.
Critics condemned the essay as historically inaccurate and an opening for anti-Semitism. The authors insisted they were not suggesting a Jewish conspiracy to hijack US foreign policy.
The dust had barely settled when Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israel-Egypt peace deal, hit US bookstores in November with a broadside provocatively titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter charges that a 'free and balanced discussion' of the Arab- Israeli conflict has been impossible in the US.
'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.
The book details 'the abominable oppression and persecution' of Palestinians, which in many ways 'is more oppressive' than apartheid was for black South Africans, Carter said.
Again, a storm erupted. Dennis Ross, a former US envoy to the Middle East, accused Carter of manipulating facts. Kenneth Stein, a Mideast scholar at Emory University's Carter Centre quit in disgust.
Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, accused Carter of hostility to Israel.
Carter's own centre-left Democratic Party also distanced itself. Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, one of the highest elected US officials, said it was 'wrong to suggest' that Jews would support 'ethnically based oppression.'
In the White House, Bush and his Republican administration have been one of the most staunchly pro-Israel governments of recent times, partly due to a religious affinity for Israel among Christian conservatives who strongly support Bush.
But public backing for Israel is also solid. A February poll on the Middle East conflict found 58 per cent of Americans sympathize with Israel and 20 per cent with the Palestinians. The Gallup survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
'All trends indicate that Americans ... understand quite clearly that the basic values we celebrate are reflected in only one country in the Middle East - our ally Israel,' AIPAC's Block said.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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