...Finally, Americans sympathize so strongly with the Israelis because both face a common enemy. Unlike Walt and Mearsheimer, who can find ''no moral basis" for taking Israel's side, most Americans make a clear moral distinction between suicide bombers and their victims. If Israeli terrorists were deliberately blowing up Palestinian school buses, if rabbis were blasting Arabs as ''the sons of monkeys and pigs," American sympathies might not be so clear-cut. Most Americans are not confused, because most Americans understand what's at stake.

''The US has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East," President John F. Kennedy said in 1962, ''really comparable only to that which it has with Britain." Today, Kennedy's words are truer than ever -- even if the Kennedy School dean has yet to figure it out.

...Alex Safian, associate director of the pro-Israel Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, said that there were numerous factual errors, detailed on his organization's website, such as overstatement of the proportion of US foreign aid received by Israel. Safian also asserted that the authors' real issue is that US foreign policy is subject to public politics and the give and take of interest groups.

''Their problem is not that a cabal is running US foreign policy," he said. ''It is that they would like to be in the cabal."

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has indicated that it will publish a 37-page rebuttal to the "Israel Lobby" paper co-authored by its academic dean, Kennedy School officials said yesterday.

The response to the "Lobby" paper, written by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and a political science professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, will be penned by a prominent Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz. Yesterday, Mr. Dershowitz told The New York Sun that the rebuttal "devastates" the Walt-Mearsheimer arguments, and challenges the authors to show that they did not cull the paper's quotes from hate Web sites.