In 2004, the Justice Department charged Pentagon staffer Lawrence Franklin with passing classified U.S. government documents to two AIPAC lobbyists, who had then given the documents to an Israeli Embassy official. In January 2006, Mr. Franklin was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, while the AIPAC staffers are still awaiting trial.

TIME columnist Joe Klein recently accused Jewish neoconservatives, who played a particularly visible role in the drive to war in Iraq and have since pushed for military confrontation in Iran, of sacrificing “U.S. lives and money ... to make the world safe for Israel.” His claims have spurred angry charges of anti-Semitism and personal attacks from critics at such neoconservative strongholds as the Weekly Standard, National Review and Commentary.

But the fierceness of the controversy surrounding Mr. Klein, who is generally considered a political centrist, highlights the growing antagonism between neoconservative hard-liners and prominent U.S. Jews whose more moderate views are aligned more closely with those of the foreign policy establishment.

The controversy began June 24, when Klein argued in a TIME blog post that the “fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like (Sen.) Joe Lieberman and the crowd at Commentary—plumped for this war (in Iraq), and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties.”

Within a day, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Mr. Klein of espousing “age-old anti-semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.”

The reaction from the right-wing press was even harsher. Commentary editor John Podhoretz reiterated the accusation of “anti-semitic canards” and called Mr. Klein “manifestly intellectually unstable.”

Writing in National Review, former George W. Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner called Mr. Klein “a man who cannot control his anger and even hatred.”

But Mr. Klein has refused to back down, accusing his attackers of using charges of anti-Semitism to silence criticism of neoconservative policies.

“When (Commentary writer) Jennifer Rubin or Abe Foxman calls me anti-semitic, they’re wrong,” he said. “I am anti-neoconservative.”

In its broad contours, the controversy is a familiar one, as critics accuse neoconservatives of exercising pernicious influence on U.S. Middle East policy and neoconservatives reply with charges of anti-semitism and conspiracy-mongering.

What distinguishes the recent furor over Mr. Klein, however, is that it involves someone who is widely regarded as an exemplar of the centrist political establishment.

Mr. Klein is best known for his 1996 novel “Primary Colors,” a thinly veiled and largely unflattering portrait of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign that was originally published anonymously and subsequently made into a Hollywood movie. A frequent critic of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Klein has at times expressed admiration for George W. Bush.

He also endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, although he has since expressed regret for his support, and he describes himself as “a strong supporter of Israel.”

The Klein dust-up is the latest in a series of events over the last several years that have placed neoconservatives both in the spotlight and on the defensive.

Neoconservatism, a predominantly—but by no means exclusively—Jewish movement, got its start in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a small but influential group of Democrats began distancing themselves from the party which, in their view, had become too dovish toward the Soviet Union and too sympathetic toward Arab demands against Israel.

By 1980, most had become strong supporters of Ronald Reagan. A number of prominent neoconservatives joined his administration, including many who later played key roles in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

Neocons had experienced a rebirth with the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and particularly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when they played a major role, both inside the administration and in the media, in rallying the public and Congress behind war in Iraq.

But with the deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the influence of neoconservatives inside and outside the administration began to wane, and critics began charging that they had led the U.S. astray.

A series of incidents also focused critical scrutiny on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying group whose hawkish right-wing leadership has often defied both the views of the broader U.S. Jewish community and the policies of Israeli governments.

In 2004, the Justice Department charged Pentagon staffer Lawrence Franklin with passing classified U.S. government documents to two AIPAC lobbyists, who had then given the documents to an Israeli Embassy official. In January 2006, Mr. Franklin was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, while the AIPAC staffers are still awaiting trial.

In March 2006, the well-respected and staunchly realist international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published the article “The Israel Lobby” in the London Review of Books. That article, which charged that the lobby had for decades skewed U.S. policy toward Israel in a direction detrimental to U.S. interests, became the basis for their 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

The Mearsheimer and Walt thesis was instantly controversial. Like Mr. Klein, they were accused by critics, including the Anti-Defamation League and Commentary, of anti-semitism and of perpetrating stereotypes about shadowy Jewish conspiracies.

But as a result of their stature, the two authors’ work clearly created political space for those, both within the foreign policy establishment and within the U.S. Jewish community, who had been long privately critical of the neoconservatives but had been worried about the consequences of going public with their misgivings.

More recently, AIPAC has come under fire for its close alliance with right-wing Christian Zionists, particularly controversial pastor John Hagee and his organization Christians United for Israel.

Rev. Hagee views an undivided Israel as a precondition for precipitating the Armageddon, and his group has accordingly pushed for hawkish U.S. policies in the Middle East that have been consistent with the neoconservatives’ own preferences.

In the wake of these developments, many observers have taken Mr. Klein’s comments—and particularly his refusal to back down in the face of withering criticism from neoconservatives—as a sign that new political space is being created for the public airing of more moderate views on Middle East policy.

M.J. Rosenberg, a former AIPAC staffer now associated with the moderate Israel Policy Forum, expressed the hope that commentators would stop equating neoconservatism with Judaism and start treating it as a political movement subject to political criticism. (IPS/GIN).

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