August 26, 2007

Broadcast Date: 
Aug 26 2007

As Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's book The Israel Lobby hits bookstores, interviews with regional expert Phyllis Bennis, Middle East scholar Joel Beinin, and journalist Michael Massing about the lobby's true history and evolving role.

Episode segments
  • Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?
    American Politics
    Phyllis Bennis is a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies where she specializes in Middle East politics and cofounder of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Phyllis Bennis asks the question of whether the tail is wagging the dog--that is, does the American "pro-Israel" lobby control US foreign policy?

  • A History of the "Special Relationship"
    American Politics
    Joel Beinin is a professor of history at Stanford University, where he teaches Middle East history, and the author of several books, including, most recently, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Joel Benin reviews the history of US-Israel relations from the creation of the Israeli state until the present.

  • Inside the Israel Lobby
    American Politics
    Michael Massing is a longtime journalist and a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review; his article "The Storm Over the Israel Lobby" appeared in the New York Review of Books.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Michael Massing looks inside the "pro-Israel" lobby--at who wields the power, why the lobby doesn't represent American Jewish public opinion, and how it wields influence.