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GUEST: Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, and the Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus. He is also the author of “Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism

This week, Palestinians commemorated the 58th anniversary of the Nakba, which marks the founding of the state of Israel and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land between 1947 and 48. Meanwhile Israel is celebrating its 58th independence day this week. Here in the US, many progressive supporters of Palestinian human rights have called attention routinely to the Israel lobby in the US as being responsible for US foreign policy in the Middle East. An article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books on the topic earlier this year, got a lot of attention. It’s called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” The article is lauded by some progressives as being courageous enough to finally take a stand on a taboo topic. It has been dismissed by people like Pro-Israel Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz as being anti-semitic. But my next guest, Stephen Zunes takes a nuanced view of the article. He has authored a special report entitled “The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?”

Read Stephen Zunes’ article.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

“There is something quite convenient and discomfortingly familiar about the tendency to blame an allegedly powerful and wealthy group of Jews for the overall direction of an increasingly controversial U.S. policy. Indeed, like exaggerated claims of Jewish power at other times in history, such an explanation absolves the real powerbrokers and assigns blame to convenient scapegoats.” — Stephen Zunes