How powerful is AIPAC?
The actual power of AIPAC and the Israel lobby is a subject of considerable debate, particularly since Walt and Mearsheimer’s analysis /The Israel Lobby/ was published. Stephen Zunes argues that the lobby’s power is less important than the basic imperial interests guiding U.S. foreign policy and notes that the United States has supported right wing regimes and combated left wing governments all over the world without the presence of a well organized ethnic or country-specific lobby like AIPAC. Uri Avnery, observing the spectacle of AIPAC’s recent national convention where Obama seemed to move sharply to the right, marveled “The most extreme conclusions of professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were confirmed in their entirety.” Still, Avnery avers, that “The more I think about this wondrous phenomenon, the stronger becomes my conviction (about which I have already written in the past) that what really matters is the similarity between the American enterprise and the Zionist one,
