America: Washington's unswerving support for Israel and its offensive in Lebanon bewilders many Europeans, some of whom suspect that US foreign policy has been hijacked by manipulative forces.
A letter to this paper on Thursday expressed this conspiracy theory in crude terms, describing US policy towards the Middle East as "a folly engineered by the powerful American Jewish lobby".
Scapegoating the Jews for America's foreign policy is not only distasteful but is thoroughly misleading.
Support for Israel stretches from the left of the Democratic Party to the Republican right, and opinion polls show consistent majorities sympathetic to Israel.
A CNN poll this week found 49 per cent of Americans believe Israel's military response to Hizbullah is about right or has not gone far enough, compared with 31 per cent who think it has gone too far.
In another poll, by Public Opinion Strategies, 45 per cent of respondents described themselves as supporters of Israel (22 per cent said they were "strong supporters") but only 6 per cent said they were supporters of the Palestinians.
Most Americans see Israel as an important ally in the Middle East, the only advanced democracy in the region and a society with similar values to the US.
Most blame the Palestinians and other Arabs for Middle East conflict and believe that the US should guarantee Israel's security.
The pro-Israeli consensus in Congress is almost universal, with only a handful of congressmen from each party arguing that Washington is too supportive of Israel.
Earlier this year, political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer suggested that the "Israel Lobby" - pro-Israel think tanks and organisations like the American Israel Political Action Committee (Aipac) - was driving US policy towards the Middle East in a direction that does not serve the American national interest.
Walt and Mearsheimer made clear that they did not view the lobby as a conspiracy and acknowledged that many American Jews did not share its aims.
"It is not meant to suggest that 'the lobby' is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues," they write.
Aipac is a highly effective lobbying organisation and the intemperate reaction to Walt and Mearsheimer in the US supports the authors' charge that the Israel lobby can be intimidating.
But if you want to find a small country with disproportionate influence in Washington you need look no further than an Irish embassy party around St Patrick's Day - or check out the Irish ambassador's dinner guest list at any other time of the year. Or just compare the small army of senators and congressmen who appear at Irish immigration rallies to the handful willing to speak to the much larger Hispanic community.
Evangelical Protestants are among the most committed supporters of Israel in the US and the lobby described by Walt and Mearsheimer is a broad political movement independent of the main American Jewish organisations. In fact, many of the organisations identified as part of the Israel lobby promote policies that most American Jews reject.
The American Jewish Committee's 2005 survey of American Jewish opinion found that most favour the establishment of a Palestinian state, 70 per cent disapprove of the war in Iraq and 60 per cent disapprove of the Bush administration's handling of the "war on terror". Most American Jews remain liberal Democrats, with only 16 per cent identifying as Republicans and just 11 per cent describing themselves as conservative.
Some of America's most prominent critics of Israel's conduct are Jews, notably Noam Chomsky (below), playwright Tony Kushner and liberal rabbi Michael Lerner.
Although some leading neo-conservatives are Jewish, most of the key architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton, are not.
For the Bush administration and the US foreign policy establishment, Israel is America's indispensable ally in the Middle East, an important source of intelligence in the region that occupies a strategic place in a volatile, resource-rich region.
Europeans may regard America's policy towards Israel as misguided, irrational or even morally wrong.
But they can't blame it on the Jews.
