“Like Israel, the authors have often had to defend the right of their theory to exist.” With that quip Thursday evening, Jane Wales, president of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, kicked off a talk on “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They spoke in the chandelier-lined Terrace Room of the swank Fairmont Hotel atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill.

Philip Weiss has called the book serious, cold, and stunning. Ditto for W&M’s presentation. I would add to that list: remarkably polished. Each man spoke for about 30 minutes and then fielded audience questions and I didn’t hear either of them stumble or utter a single “um” or “eh”.

The audience reaction was less raucous than I expected. It wasn’t raucous at all, actually. People listened attentively in complete silence until about 45 minutes in when there was a light sprinkling of applause at Mearsheimer’s suggestion of a viable Palestinian state. The crowd was uniformly polite and, judging from the sizeable lineup for book signatures, at least somewhat supportive.

In a way it was heartening to see the room packed with influential-looking people: almost exclusively middle-aged to elderly, white, mostly in suits and evening wear. On the other hand, in a room of several hundred, I was probably one of just a dozen attendees under 30—likely due in part to the World Affairs Council’s unfortunate decision to charge for tickets. So to Farrar, Straus and Giroux: add more campuses to W&M’s tour. Most students won’t be willing to shell out $26 for a book, but it would be a smart move in terms of intellectual and cultural impact.

The younger and sprier of the two scholars, Walt defined the Israel Lobby (like any other interest group; not monolithic; not composed exclusively of Jews), calling it “as American as apple pie,” an oft-repeated line designed to ease concerns the authors are somehow painting American Jews as a dangerous fifth column. They are explicitly not doing that.

Walt reminded the audience that Israel, a prosperous nation of 7 million people, receives $3-4 billion in U.S. foreign aid per year, constituting roughly $500 of U.S. aid per Israeli citizen. He contrasted this to another democratic ally, India, which receives just $200 million in annual aid despite its vast population of over one billion. Walt made the case that such unconditional U.S. support of Israel is, on balance, a strategic liability and that “Israel’s treatment of its own Arab population and especially its treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is sharply at odds with American values.”

Walt outlined the influence of various pro-Israel groups in Washington, chief among them AIPAC — which he called “highly professional with a very energetic grassroots base” — a group with an annual budget of around $50 million that helps to draft legislation, provides members of Congress with talking points, and writes letters for them to sign. Walt said pro-Israel PACs alone gave $55 million to Congressional and national candidates between 1992 and 2005. By comparison, Arab-American PACs gave $800,000 in the same 13-year period. He cited a set of bipartisan testimonials of the pro-Israel lobby’s influence, including Sen. Daniel Inouye’s explanation of why he had signed an AIPAC-sponsored letter in 1975: “ It’s easier to sign one letter than to answer 5,000.” For more on the lobby, read Glenn Greenwald today on Rudy Giuliani’s wildly hawkish position on Israel/Palestine.

Walt didn’t mention the fact that the Obama campaign recently rushed to take down an unintentional ad from Amazon’s page for “The Israel Lobby.” But he did note that Obama has been denounced merely because a campaign advisor, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, had praised Walt and Mearsheimer’s original article on the lobby. “To his credit, Obama has not ditched Brzezinski,” Walt said.

Mearsheimer took on the question, “Is the Israel Lobby’s influence on U.S. policy positive or negative for the United States and positive or negative for Israel itself?” answering in the negative on both counts. Walt’s elder and a founder of the foreign policy school of realism, Mearsheimer spoke in a thick and deliberate voice, bracing himself with a hand on the podium.

He spent much of his time arguing that America’s unconditional support for Israel was a key source — not the only one — of our terrorism problem, largely because the U.S. position vis-a-vis Israel inflames Arab opinion. Rejecting the argument that Osama bin Laden’s post-9/11 references to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have been novel or “opportunistic,” Mearsheimer cited, among other data, the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that OBL wanted a plane to hit Congress specifically because it is an important source of U.S. support for Israel. Mearsheimer also laid out evidence that both Israel and the Israel Lobby had pushed for the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, noting that the neocons believed the war would be good for Israel and the United States. This was all while polls showed American Jews to be 10 percent less supportive of the war than the general population, he said.

Walt and Mearsheimer’s conclusion is that the U.S. should treat Israel like an ordinary country, like England, France, India, or Japan. Thus when Israel is acting in ways that are consistent with American interests, Washington should back the Jewish state, Mearsheimer said. When it is not, the U.S. should distance itself from Israel and use its considerable leverage to get Israel to change its behavior. He also believes Washington should come to Israel’s defense if its survival were at stake, which currently, he stressed, it is not. He argued that the U.S. should be an even-handed, honest broker when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, should support a viable Palestinian state, and should pressure Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

Only once during the talk was Mearsheimer, the quintessential staid academic, displaced, ever so slightly, from his cold, lawyerly style. In response to a question about whether he recognized various threats to Israel, Mearsheimer, voice rising, delivered an impassioned yet methodical analysis of terrorism:

“The reason that the Palestinians are employing terrorist tactics against the Israelis is because they don’t have a state of their own and they desperately want one. When the Jews, the Zionists, were trying to establish a state of Israel, how do you think they drove the British out of Palestine? [between 1944-47] ... How do you think they did it? With the IDF? There was no IDF. There was no army because they didn’t have a state. You know what there principal weapon was? It was terrorism. Jewish terrorism. Were the Zionists employing terrorism because they were evil? No. They were weak. And terrorism is a weapon of the weak. It was the only way they could get the British out of Palestine to get their own state. And the Palestinians are doing effectively the same thing. They are weak. There’s no way they could fight a conventional war against the IDF, so they use terrorism. You want to make that problem go away? Give them a state, then they have something to lose. .... But overall — and this is the main point I want to make — overall, Israel has been wildly successful on the security front and it is not about to fall off the cliff. This is good news.”