An Israeli border policeman stands guard near the entrance to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. (Moti Milrod, Maan Images)

The hallmark of democracy is that it allows for the self-correction of government policies. Whether from the privacy of a ballot box, or the public arena of free speech and a free press, the necessary political will eventually emerges to change a bad policy or to stop it dead in the water.

But such political will falters in the case of US foreign policy regarding Israel, which - for a variety of structural and historical reasons - has been set on a self-defeating course ever since the June 1967 war.

Examples abound of policy self-corrections that have saved America from disasters both large and small. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932 at the height of the Depression brought a laissez-faire economy out of its tailspin with new interventionist policies. Vietnam War demonstrators and combat-zone reporters like David Halberstam convinced militarist politicians, however belatedly, to end a futile conflict and discard a faulty-domino theory. Of less dire consequence: when economists have shown that cuts in small but cherished public subsidies lead to better outcomes for everybody, even populist politicians have usually gone along.

But the case of US policy toward Israel is different. In spite of ample evidence that the blind American embrace of anything and everything Israel does in the occupied territories and to its neighbors severely hurts US interests in the region, America's pro-Israel tilt remains as slanted as the leaning tower of Pisa. Over a period of 40 years, this policy has only gone further askew.

The structural reasons for this failure to self-correct were examined last year by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in

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their analysis of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, both through the strong-arm political tactics of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and in the more apparently neutral policy analysis of such Israel-aligned think tanks as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the American Enterprise Institute.

But political lobbying is the great game in Washington, and as long as its disclosure rules are followed, and lobbyists for foreign governments register themselves as such, there is no permanent threat to the national interest.

AIPAC has lost, lately, its share of skirmishes. Jonathan Pollard, the Navy intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel, is still in prison, despite the lobby's strong push for his release.

Walt's and Mearsheimer's report had a fair hearing, despite charges of anti-Semitism from the lobby's top guns, and pressure on the press to bury its coverage - their article was published in the London Review of Books after The Atlantic Monthly backed out of its promise to run it.

What might better explain the runaway US policy toward Israel are a series of historical phenomena, all, in fact, incidental to the internal dynamics of US-Israeli relations.

To read the full article please visit Middle East Times.