The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the hyper-controversial book by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, has been garnering almost exclusively negative reviews in the American press over the past month. When asked about this at a recent event at Columbia University, Mearsheimer dismissed the critical response as completely predictable and further evidence of how the Israel lobby stifles debate about American foreign policy in the Middle East. As proof, he points to the more generous reception the book has received in Europe and, indeed, in Israel itself.

Amitai Etzioni is not of the mind that either the Israel lobby is an all-powerful Washington behemoth or that Mearsheimer and Walt have written an anti-Semitic book. The George Washington University professor is more interested in the data Mearsheimer and Walt use to make their case. And how does the quantitative data hold up to Etzioni's scrutiny? "I will donate my house to anyone who can find a half respectable social science publication that would publish what these two present as evidence," Etzioni writes.