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First of all, throughout the letter he doesn't just mean Jewish-American Zionists. He surely knows of the right wing 'Christian' kind (i.e. Dubya and Robertson) and the liberal Jewish kind, otherwise I think he'd use the religious and ethnic/tribal terms as more poignant.
As for influence...there simply is a pretty large chunk of older Jewish-American men of means and fairly high positions who have made a set of right wing views about the Middle East and commitments to the right wing governing elites of Israel the emotional center of their lives. Many are aligned with Democrats in most or all other elements of American life and politics. Wolfowitz and Perle are just the most obvious and foolish of this group, but they have a lot of friends and advocates- the Sulzberger NYT is quite a hotbed with Judy Miller, Tom Friedman, and Charles Krauthammer (or is he WaPo?), for example. And people like Allan Dershowitz who do things like defend Israel's torture of Palestinians, then American abuses at Abu Ghraib learned from Israeli "specialists". There's all of "Commentary" magazine, too, in which you can see all the paid advocates ('neocons') and True Believers and even a few of these magnates, like Edgar Bronfman, pontificate about Jewish-American internal politics and Israel's right to torture/kill Palestinians and against their post-tribalist bete noirs (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Peter Finkelstein, Michael Lerner, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Meretz, Shalom Achshav, Amos Oz, David Grossman, the 'New Historians', Reform Judaism, much of German Jewry (vs Jewish Pale Ashkenazim), gay marriage), and against "pro-Arab" folks like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (A.J.Heschel and Susannah Heschel get passed over in silence.)
If you want to look at their influence in the Party, it is diminishing but was very high- these people are practically the only highly wealthy demographic that has backed Democrats throughout its post-LBJ permanent minority period, largely because Republicans were overtly anti-Semitic and backed Israel as a regional Cold War proxy/prostitute. Have a look at the AIPAC effort (AIPAC is/was the center of their political game) and who they went to and what their ugly arguments and threats went to when Bush Sr denied money to Israel for more colonization/building on Palestinian land in 1990 or 1991. Then there's the Jonathan Pollard affair. Rumors around MIT (where he is still employed) are that John Deutsch was fired as CIA Director in iirc 1998 because they found materials ostensibly leaked to 'friends of Israel' on his laptop, not (as alleged publicly) porn or routine classified office papers for home viewing. At this point Joe Lieberman is probably the epitome of the their relationship with Democrats, and the likes of Mike Bloomberg, Norm Coleman, Tom Lantos, Eric Cantor, Diane Feinstein, and Jane Harman also reflect the conflictedness and attempts to suffuse or compromise the two conflicting ideological elements.
If you want to know the existing influence of hardcore 'pro-Israel' Democrats, look at the Iraq war positions of the Senators from the tri-state area. Menendez comes in late and is anti-continuation of war. Dodd is intentionally wishy-washy. Hillary Clinton, Schumer, and Lautenberg have electorates and a Party that that are as anti-war as anywhere in the country but they still refuse to change their public position on the war. Privately, Clinton and Lautenberg have apparently considered Iraq a near-dead enterprise and failure for 2 or 3 years- but they can't afford to say so openly. Schumer is no fool, he knows perfectly well that Iraq is a backfire and disaster, but he smartly hasn't let slip a hint of doubt about his pro-war vote as far as I know. I won't say these people are bought, per se, but NY/NJ are extremely expensive states in which to run political campaigns. Underlying that are enough ethnic and class factionalism and old group grudges left in and around New York City, which any overt or covert energetic and unrelenting ugly PR campaign can exploit to damage any politician to the point that it isn't worth staying in office. Especially with the 'Pinch' Sulzberger NYT having the hardline 'pro-Israel' i.e. pro-Likudnik political line it does and demanding it of local and national leaders, along with the WSJ and Daily News more than willing to damage any Democrat at any opportunity whatsoever.
I don't think any of this is unknown in Teheran. And, like a lot of bad right wing screeds, the formal 'argument' made by Ahmedinajad can in many ways be discounted on its face. But like those screeds, the contents do touch on and suggest some fundamental problem that Democrats at present have not adequately addressed. In the form of Joe Lieberman in particular, but also in form of the Clintons and others, we do have a problem of many Democratic leaders and voters having right wing commitments involving Israel/the Middle East that don't reconcile well with the increasingly committed center-Left position of the Party on international relations elsewhere and at home.
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