When Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007, they took pains to distance themselves from the notion of a “Jewish lobby.” No, their “Israel lobby,” they insisted, was composed of “a loose coalition of individuals and organisations … made up of both Jews and gentiles.” In a passionate letter to the New York Times, they protested:

We never employ the term in our book. Indeed, we explicitly rejected this label as inaccurate and misleading, both because the lobby includes non-Jews like the Christian Zionists and because many Jewish Americans do not support the hard-line policies favored by its most powerful elements. The Israel lobby, we emphasized, is defined by its “specific political agenda … not the religious or ethnic identity of those pushing it.”

But words slip and slide in usage and meaning, rarely obeying the bidding of their authors. Such has been the fate of “Israel lobby.”

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