In his recent column (“The Case Against the Israel Lobby,” Feb. 7), Don Casler blindly leveled the highly controversial assertion that the so-called “Israel Lobby” manipulates American foreign policy against our national interest. In his piece, Casler fails to provide any legitimate evidence supporting his claims, but instead, he reverts to a conspiracy theory of the Zionists controlling the media and the government to prop up his claims.

The article cites the essay “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which asserts that a loose coalition of countless, unrelated Jewish and Zionist organizations control American foreign policy. Casler endorses this claim despite the fact that government officials and scholars across the political spectrum have described the work as a travesty. David Gergen, former presidential advisor to President Reagan and President Clinton, described the charges as “wildly at variance with what I have personally witnessed in the Oval Office.” Walt and Mearsheimer’s claim of the existence of an Israel Lobby amounts to nothing more than, in the words of former Secretary of State George Shultz, “a conspiracy theory, pure and simple.”

That being said, I do not deny that many of the pro-Israel interest groups in America are powerful. However, their power does not arise from Jewish political influence as Casler claims, but rather from the moral and strategic asset that Israel truly is to America. In the entirety of the Middle East, Israel is the sole country that is host to a liberal democracy, that preserves freedom of speech and the freedom of the press (Israel has more newspapers per capita than any other nation) and that ensures the rights of women and minority groups are preserved.

Israel’s free-market economy, also the only one in the region, is a hub for high-tech and environmentally sustainable inventions, as well as a home to cutting edge research in its academic institutions.

Few countries in the world have military ties as close as those between the United States and Israel, and intelligence sharing and defense cooperation have been credited with saving thousands of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, the reactive armor tiles found on American combat vehicles, which are a key defense against the explosive devices responsible for killing countless American servicemen and women, were developed in Israel and made in cooperation with General Dynamics in the United States. Furthermore, Israel — surrounded by countries in upheaval such as Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq — is the last remaining platform of pro-Western stability in the Middle East.

While the future of the region is unclear, the existence of an island of democracy and stability in a sea of turmoil is invaluable to our national interest. These are the reasons that the U.S. government and the American people have such a strong relationship with Israel, not because of Jewish money and political power as Casler claims.

To assert that the hostility built up across much of the Muslim world toward America stems from our support for the tiny state of Israel and our continued refusal to allow it to be wiped off the map — a threat it has faced ever since its inception — is willfully ignorant. In fact, Israel is often the first line of defense against the threats posed by these hostile entities rather than serving as the underlying cause. There is a long list of grievances that precede the Arab-Israeli conflict which contribute to our tenuous relationship with much of the Muslim world.

Instead of attributing this strong relationship between the U.S. and Israel to a conspiracy theory about how the Zionists control the government, it behooves us to consider what America’s real national interests are and how they can be pursued. If maintaining a strong relationship with the only liberal democracy and bastion of freedom in the Middle East does not constitute a legitimate national interest worthy of the support of the American people, I do not know what else does.

Adam Schneider ’15 is the vice president of Dartmouth Students for Israel.