Just in case you don't think there's lots of money to be made in the anti-Israel trade, here's some news that will set you aright. You remember John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, they of the shabby pretend-scholarly JFK School paper "The Israel Lobby." It was much talked and written about, with almost every commentary being either a serious demolition of the work or, at best for the authors, "well, yes, they did go off the deep end, didn't they?" There were a few academics who found the document bolstered their own anti-Israel politics. Stanley Hoffmann, for example, who wrote in The New York Review of Books that "the most flagrant case" of a foreign power trying to influence the United States was the Israel lobby. He called the paper "taboo-breaking," no less, although I thought Hoffmann himself had years ago broken the so-called "taboo" with a public statement beginning, "We Jews Can No Longer Keep Silent..." And, then, there is Tony Judt who, apparently on the evidence of other such successful experiments in the Middle East, wants Palestine to be a bi-national Arab-Jewish state, a dream that died long ago when no Arabs of Palestine were interested, although lots of Jews from Martin Buber on down were. David Duke thought the paper vindicated him. Now, that's a big compliment. TNR took the appearance of what the K School called a "faculty research paper" as a serious event, especially since it coincided with the upsurge in Muslim terrorism--the cause of which many American and European leftists want to fob off on Israel and its friends. Another evil of the Israel lobby, but with capitol letters. In any case, read what we wrote in the aftermath here, here, here, and here. David Duke loved the paper. So what's the new news about M & W? One of the most distinguished publishing houses in the country, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux has given the two professors a book contract to enlarge and expand. And the cash advance attached to it is $750,000. In the old days, books like these would have been published either by vanity presses or by ideological crank presses.