Only days after they were groaning with fury at the Israeli lobby’s success in hounding the outspoken Charles Freeman away from his proposed intelligence job for President Obama, the Arabs now have to contend with an Israeli Foreign Minister whose – let us speak frankly – racist comments about Palestinian loyalty tests have brought into the new Netanyahu cabinet one of the most unpleasant politicians in the Middle East.

The Iraqis produced the hateful Saddam, the Iranians created the crackpot Ahmadinejad – for reasons of sanity, I leave out the weird ruler of Libya – and now the Israelis have exalted a man, Avigdor Lieberman, who out-Sharons even Ariel Sharon.

A few Palestinians expressed their cruel delight that at last the West will see the “true face” of Israel. I’ve heard that one before – when Sharon became prime minister – and the usual nonsense will be trotted out that only a “hard-line extremist” can make the compromises necessary for a deal with the Palestinians.

This kind of self-delusion is a Middle East disease. The fact is that the Israeli Prime Minister-to-be has made it perfectly clear there will be no two-state solution; and he has planted a tree on Golan to show the Syrians they will not get it back. And now he’s brought into the cabinet a man who sees even the Arabs of Israel as second-class citizens.

Lieberman’s first visit to Washington will be a gem. AIPAC – posing as an Israeli lobby when in fact it works for the Likudists – will fight for him and Lady Hillary will have to greet him warmly at the State Department. Who knows, he might even suggest to her that she imposes a loyalty test for American minorities as well – which would mean demanding an oath of faithfulness from Barack himself. The horizon goes on forever.

In Egypt, Avigdor Lieberman will have a tough time. Hosni Mubarak can be a soft touch for the Americans but it was Lieberman who, complaining that the Egyptian President should visit Israel or “go to hell”, deeply offended a man who has taken great risks in maintaining his country’s peace with the Israeli state.

Egyptians have been outraged to read in their newspapers that Lieberman has talked of drowning Palestinians in the Dead Sea or executing Israeli Palestinians who talked to Hamas. Last night, a supporter of Lieberman appeared on Al Jazeera television to describe Hamas as “an anti-Semitic, barbarous organisation” – even though Israeli army officers spoke openly with this supposedly “barbarous” group both before and after the Oslo agreement.

But the growth of such an extremist administration in Israel and the hopeless response of the Obama administration to the so-called supporters of Israel who destroyed Freeman’s career, can only be dangerous news for the Middle East. The Jeddah-based Arab News called the Freeman disaster “a grave defeat for US foreign policy”. But while uttering all the usual platitudes, the Arab press has been playing up the pusillanimous remarks of US press secretary Robert Gibbs when asked why Obama was “standing mute” in the Freeman affair. “I’ve watched with great interest how people perceive different things about our policy and during the campaign about whether we were too close to one group or too close to the other. So I don’t give a lot of thought to those.” Asked for “straight answers”, Gibbs said: “I gave you as straight a one as I can get.”

This was almost as funny as The New York Times when it attempted last week to explain why Lady Hillary was frightened of offending the Israelis during the formation of the Netanyahu government when she described the destruction of 1,000 Palestinian homes as “unhelpful”.

Her caution in the Middle East, it explained, was “a reflection of the treacherous landscape in the Middle East, where a misplaced phrase can ruffle feathers among constituencies back home”. You bet it can – and when Mr Lieberman comes to town, we’ll see who those feathers belong to.

Their owners would do well, however, to dwell on the incendiary language of Avigdor Lieberman. He speaks like a Russian nationalist rather than the secular Israeli he claims to be.

I covered the bloodbath of Bosnia in the early Nineties and I can identify Lieberman’s language – of executions, of drownings, of hell and loyalty oaths – with the language of Messrs Mladic and Karadzic and Milosevic.

Lady Hillary and her boss should pull out a few books on the war in ex-Yugoslavia if they want to understand who they are now dealing with. “Unhelpful” will not be the appropriate response.

Is the Ministry of Fear about to be reopened? I thought – when Lord Blair finally departed from us and George Bush left the White House – that the institution had been closed down, that we might have been allowed a few hours in the broad sunlit uplands. Change? Hope? Renewal? Inspiration? But no, the semantics of our masters are reverting to type. There are no uplands, just another new dark age of fear and terror.

A few months ago, the following Bush-speak would be wearily familiar. “Let me be clear: al-Qa’ida and its allies – the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks – are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qa’ida is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan … if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qa’ida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.” Only, of course, this wasn’t Bush-speak. It was a Bush-clone, called Obama-speak.

And now a reversion to Blair-speak: “Contemporary terrorist organisations aspire to use chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. Changing technology and the theft and smuggling of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials make this aspiration more realistic than it may have been in the recent past…” Yup, that’s the Home Office for you. Dirty bombs. Biological weapons, according to the Home Office intelligence girls and boys – the same crew, presumably, who helped to give us weapons of mass destruction and five-minute warnings six years ago but who now work for Lady Jacqui. I thought it was Churchill who warned us in 1940 of a new dark age “made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science”.

That these two crimson-lit warnings should have come within three days of each other last month was surely not by chance. Note how the Taliban has now become conflated with al-Qa’ida, how the land mass of the Middle East has been pushed further east. Once it was Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Now it’s Afghanistan and Pakistan. And note how Tube train bombings in London have suddenly turned into dirty bombs, poison and radioactivity. The border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is now “the most dangerous place in the world”, according to Obama.

Well, tell that to the Raj. Didn’t Sir Mortimer Durand define the frontier – henceforth the Durand line – to separate India from Afghanistan? And hasn’t it always been “the most dangerous place in the world” (save, I suppose, for “Palestine” which – for all the usual reasons – got left out of the Obama speech of 27 March). Wasn’t it just a few miles up the road, in the Kabul Gorge, that an entire British army was wiped out in 1842? And was it not in 1893 that Lord Roberts spoke of “the policy of endeavouring to extend our influence over, and establish law and order on, that part of the border where anarchy, murder and robbery up to the present time have reigned supreme … Some 40 years ago the policy of non-interference with the tribes, so long as they did not trouble us, may have been wise and prudent, though selfish and not altogether worthy of a great civilising power”.

Yup, it was that same “porous” border – and count how many times you read the word “porous” in the weeks to come – that Obama is now talking about. The problem is that the dratted Pathans think this place is called Pushtunistan and no more recognise the Durand line today than they did in the 19th century. And when millions of people just don’t recognise a border, then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (or President Obama’s) aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. “We will insist that action be taken – one way or another – when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets,” Obama promises. If the Pakistani government doesn’t take action, the US will.

Ho hum. In the days of empire, we crossed the Durand line from the Raj into Afghanistan. Now Obama’s going to change the plot by invading in the opposite direction, from Afghanistan into the former Raj. And with just 20,000 extra troops. My colleague John Griffiths has been researching Soviet files on Moscow’s attempts to stamp out “terrorism” in Afghanistan with surges and cross-border raids. Here’s an analysis from the Soviet Frunze Military Academy on the “terrorists” the Russians fought in Afghanistan for eight bloody years:

“Several combat principles lay at the heart of mujahedin tactics. First, they avoided direct contact with the superior might of regular forces which could have wiped them out. Second, the mujahedin practically never conducted positional warfare and, when threatened with encirclement, would abandon their positions. Third, in all forms of combat the mujahedin always strove to achieve surprise. Fourth, the mujahedin employed terror and ideological conditioning on a peaceful populace as well as on local government representatives.”

The Frunze lads concluded that their “terrorist” enemies enjoyed night action, could move rapidly through the border mountains (in Obama’s “most dangerous place in the world”), had a broad intelligence network and could pick up details of secret Soviet unit movements. Now who does that remind you of? In his soon-to-be-published book, Griffiths recommends that the Frunze report should lie on every US president’s desk, permanently open at this page.

Do we never learn? Muslim Pakistan is detonating in front of our eyes while Israel, when it’s not grabbing more land from Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank, is claiming that Iran – not Pakistan – is the greatest threat to world peace. Its foreign minister doesn’t even want a Palestinian state any more. And what should we be doing? Trying to resolve the wound of Kashmir, of “Palestine”, of Kurdistan, of Lebanon. But no, we’re off on another adventure. Poison, dirty bombs, the lot. The most dangerous place in the world. Carry on up the Khyber.

“John” is John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a 50-year-old tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The two men have caused one of the most extraordinary political storms over the Middle East in recent American history by stating what to many non-Americans is obvious: that the US has been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel, that Israel is a liability in the “war on terror”, that the biggest Israeli lobby group, Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is in fact the agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress – so much so that US policy towards Israel is not debated there – and that the lobby monitors and condemns academics who are critical of Israel.

“Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy,” the authors have written, “…stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism … Anti-Semitism is something no-one wants to be accused of.” This is strong stuff in a country where – to quote the late Edward Said – the “last taboo” (now that anyone can talk about blacks, gays and lesbians) is any serious discussion of America’s relationship with Israel.

Walt is already the author of an elegantly written account of the resistance to US world political dominance, a work that includes more than 50 pages of references. Indeed, those who have read his Taming Political Power: The Global Response to US Primacy will note that the Israeli lobby gets a thumping in this earlier volume because Aipac “has repeatedly targeted members of Congress whom it deemed insufficiently friendly to Israel and helped drive them from office, often by channelling money to their opponents.”

But how many people in America are putting their own heads above the parapet, now that Mearsheimer and Walt have launched a missile that would fall to the ground unexploded in any other country but which is detonating here at high speed? Not a lot. For a while, the mainstream US press and television – as pro-Israeli, biased and gutless as the two academics infer them to be – did not know whether to report on their conclusions (originally written for The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors apparently took fright, and subsequently reprinted in the London Review of Books in slightly truncated form) or to remain submissively silent. The New York Times, for example, only got round to covering the affair in depth well over two weeks after the report’s publication, and then buried its article in the education section on page 19. The academic essay, according to the paper’s headline, had created a “debate” about the lobby’s influence.

They can say that again. Dore Gold, a former ambassador to the UN, who now heads an Israeli lobby group, kicked off by unwittingly proving that the Mearsheimer-Walt theory of “anti-Semitism” abuse is correct. “I believe,” he said, “that anti-Semitism may be partly defined as asserting a Jewish conspiracy for doing the same thing non-Jews engage in.” Congressman Eliot Engel of New York said that the study itself was “anti-Semitic” and deserved the American public’s contempt.

Walt has no time for this argument. “We are not saying there is a conspiracy, or a cabal. The Israeli lobby has every right to carry on its work – all Americans like to lobby. What we are saying is that this lobby has a negative influence on US national interests and that this should be discussed. There are vexing problems out in the Middle East and we need to be able to discuss them openly. The Hamas government, for example – how do we deal with this? There may not be complete solutions, but we have to try and have all the information available.”

Walt doesn’t exactly admit to being shocked by some of the responses to his work – it’s all part of his desire to keep “discourse” in the academic arena, I suspect, though it probably won’t work. But no-one could be anything but angered by his Harvard colleague, Alan Dershowitz, who announced that the two scholars recycled accusations that “would be seized on by bigots to promote their anti-Semitic agendas”. The two are preparing a reply to Dershowitz’s 45-page attack, but could probably have done without praise from the white supremacist and ex-Ku Klux Klan head David Duke – adulation which allowed newspapers to lump the name of Duke with the names of Mearsheimer and Walt. “Of Israel, Harvard and David Duke,” ran the Washington Post’s reprehensible headline.

The Wall Street Journal, ever Israel’s friend in the American press, took an even weirder line on the case. “As Ex-Lobbyists of Pro-Israel Group Face Court, Article Queries Sway on Mideast Policy” its headline proclaimed to astonished readers. Neither Mearsheimer nor Walt had mentioned the trial of two Aipac lobbyists – due to begin next month – who are charged under the Espionage Act with receiving and disseminating classified information provided by a former Pentagon Middle East analyst. The defence team for Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman has indicated that it may call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to the stand.

Almost a third of the Journal’s report is taken up with the Rosen-Weissman trial, adding that the indictment details how the two men “allegedly sought to promote a hawkish US policy toward Iran by trading favours with a number of senior US officials. Lawrence Franklin, the former Pentagon official, has pleaded guilty to misusing classified information. Mr Franklin was charged with orally passing on information about a draft National Security Council paper on Iran to the two lobbyists… as well as other classified information. Mr Franklin was sentenced in December to nearly 13 years in prison…”

The Wall Street Journal report goes on to say that lawyers and “many Jewish leaders” – who are not identified – “say the actions of the former Aipac employees were no different from how thousands of Washington lobbyists work. They say the indictment marks the first time in US history that American citizens… have been charged with receiving and disseminating state secrets in conversations.” The paper goes on to say that “several members of Congress have expressed concern about the case since it broke in 2004, fearing that the Justice Department may be targeting pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as Aipac. These officials (sic) say they’re eager to see the legal process run its course, but are concerned about the lack of transparency in the case.”

As far as Dershowitz is concerned, it isn’t hard for me to sympathise with the terrible pair. He it was who shouted abuse at me during an Irish radio interview when I said that we had to ask the question “Why?” after the 11 September 2001 international crimes against humanity. I was a “dangerous man”, Dershowitz shouted over the air, adding that to be “anti-American” – my thought-crime for asking the “Why?” question – was the same as being anti-Semitic. I must, however, also acknowledge another interest. Twelve years ago, one of the Israeli lobby groups that Mearsheimer and Walt fingers prevented any second showing of a film series on Muslims in which I participated for Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel – by stating that my “claim” that Israel was building large Jewish settlements on Arab land was “an egregious falsehood”. I was, according to another Israeli support group, “a Henry Higgins with fangs”, who was “drooling venom into the living rooms of America.”

Such nonsense continues to this day. In Australia to launch my new book on the Middle East, for instance, I repeatedly stated that Israel – contrary to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists – was not responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Yet the Australian Jewish News claimed that I “stopped just millimetres short of suggesting that Israel was the cause of the 9/11 attacks. The audience reportedly (and predictably) showered him in accolades.”

This was untrue. There was no applause and no accolades and I never stopped “millimetres” short of accusing Israel of these crimes against humanity. The story in the Australian Jewish News is a lie.

So I have to say that – from my own humble experience – Mearsheimer and Walt have a point. And for a man who says he has not been to Israel for 20 years – or Egypt, though he says he had a “great time” in both countries – Walt rightly doesn’t claim any on-the-ground expertise. “I’ve never flown into Afghanistan on a rickety plane, or stood at a checkpoint and seen a bus coming and not known if there is a suicide bomber aboard,” he says.

Noam Chomsky, America’s foremost moral philosopher and linguistics academic – so critical of Israel that he does not even have a regular newspaper column – does travel widely in the region and acknowledges the ruthlessness of the Israeli lobby. But he suggests that American corporate business has more to do with US policy in the Middle East than Israel’s supporters – proving, I suppose, that the Left in the United States has an infinite capacity for fratricide. Walt doesn’t say he’s on the left, but he and Mearsheimer objected to the invasion of Iraq, a once lonely stand that now appears to be as politically acceptable as they hope – rather forlornly – that discussion of the Israeli lobby will become.

Walt sits in a Malaysian restaurant with me, patiently (though I can hear the irritation in his voice) explaining that the conspiracy theories about him are nonsense. His stepping down as dean of the Kennedy School was a decision taken before the publication of his report, he says. No one is throwing him out. The much-publicised Harvard disclaimer of ownership to the essay – far from being a gesture of fear and criticism by the university as his would-be supporters have claimed – was mainly drafted by Walt himself, since Mearsheimer, a friend as well as colleague, was a Chicago scholar, not a Harvard don.

But something surely has to give.

Across the United States, there is growing evidence that the Israeli and neo-conservative lobbies are acquiring ever greater power. The cancellation by a New York theatre company of My Name is Rachel Corrie – a play based on the writings of the young American girl crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003 – has deeply shocked liberal Jewish Americans, not least because it was Jewish American complaints that got the performance pulled.

“How can the West condemn the Islamic world for not accepting Mohamed cartoons,” Philip Weiss asked in The Nation, “when a Western writer who speaks out on behalf of Palestinians is silenced? And why is it that Europe and Israel itself have a healthier debate over Palestinian human rights than we can have here?” Corrie died trying to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home. Enemies of the play falsely claim that she was trying to stop the Israelis from collapsing a tunnel used to smuggle weapons. Hateful e-mails were written about Corrie. Weiss quotes one that reads: “Rachel Corrie won’t get 72 virgins but she got what she wanted.”

Saree Makdisi – a close relative of the late Edward Said – has revealed how a right-wing website is offering cash for University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) students who report on the political leanings of their professors, especially their views on the Middle East. Those in need of dirty money at UCLA should be aware that class notes, handouts and illicit recordings of lectures will now receive a bounty of $100. “I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory ‘profile’,” Makdisi says, “…not for what I have said in my classes on English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake – my academic speciality, which the website avoids mentioning – but rather for what I have written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics.”

Mearsheimer and Walt include a study of such tactics in their report. “In September 2002,” they write, “Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (www.campus-watch.org) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel… the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.”

Perhaps the most incendiary paragraph in the essay – albeit one whose contents have been confirmed in the Israeli press – discusses Israel’s pressure on the United States to invade Iraq. “Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes,” the two academics write, quoting a retired Israeli general as saying: “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.”

Walt says he might take a year’s sabbatical – though he doesn’t want to get typecast as a “lobby” critic – because he needs a rest after his recent administrative post. There will be Israeli lobbyists, no doubt, who would he happy if he made that sabbatical a permanent one. I somehow doubt he will.

* This article was first published in The Independent, 27 April 2006. Read all articles by Robert Fisk.