In March 2006, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” as a “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.”
In their essay, which was the basis of the book of the same name that appeared the next year, Mearsheimer and Walt had been careful to distinguish the Israel lobby from a lobby by and for Jews, but it was to no avail in the furor that the essay and book provoked.
Two decades later, as the United States and Israel wage a senseless war against Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt’s case for the inordinate influence of Israel and the Israel lobby over American foreign policy looks pretty good. So does their contention that the policies promoted by Israel and its lobby are not in America’s interest.
Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist who has documented the lobby’s influence, and Ian Lustick, a retired political scientist and expert on the Middle East, have written a worthy sequel to Mearsheimer and Walt’s book, entitled “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power”. Like Mearsheimer and Walt, they use the term “lobby” to refer to a “loose network” of groups, media outlets, and wealthy individuals. They do an excellent job of explaining how this lobby has grown and altered its approach over the last two decades.
As Clifton and Lustick show, the lobby has changed the way it tries to influence election outcomes. Before the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which opened the door to super-PACs and unlimited contributions, AIPAC and affiliated groups tried to influence elections and elected officials through campaign contributions. But AIPAC itself did not contribute to candidates or officials. Instead, its leadership urged its members, which included the very wealthy, to back certain politicians and to oppose others based on whether they had backed or opposed measures that were in Israel’s interest. Members of the House and Senate committees that oversaw foreign aid could expect generous contributions if they backed aid to Israel. Donors gave these contributions directly to candidates and to sympathetic local PACs like Badger PAC or Gold Coast PAC, which in turn doled them out to candidates.
In the last decade, national groups that support Israel’s government have established their own super PACs that wage independent expenditure campaigns either for or against candidates. In 2019, Mark Mellman founded Democratic Majority for Israel. In 2021, AIPAC founded the United Democracy Project. These committees have spent huge sums. According to Federal Election Commission records, the United Democracy Project has doled out $104 million between January 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026. In August, the UDP alone spent $2.5 million to oppose an Afghan-American candidate, Aisha Wahab, in a runoff for the northern California congressional seat vacated by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.
In the past, wealthy American supporters of Israel’s government also exercised influence as individuals. Businessman Abraham Feinberg was a major funder of Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign, which gained him access to Truman and allowed him to influence Truman’s policy toward the new state of Israel. Feinberg was, however, small potatoes by current standards. During the last decade, what Clifton and Lustick describe as a “small set of megadonors” have backed unconditional support for Israel. Clifton and Lustick highlight nine donors, including Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Yass, Larry Ellison, Haim Saban, the late Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer, who have contributed over $1.7 billion in disclosed contributions since 2012. These contributions, they note, do not include undisclosed “dark money.”
Some of these contributions, like those from the Adelsons, directly affected policy. The Adelsons’ contributions to Donald Trump in 2016 were reportedly based on an understanding that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which he did upon taking office. While AIPAC and the formal lobbies have influenced Congress, the megadonors have specialized in winning over the executive branch.
The groups supportive of Israel’s government have also changed how they have made their case for supporting Israel. When Mearsheimer and Walt were writing their book, the groups could still rely on widespread public support for Israel. If anything, the pro-Israel set in American politics had grown to include Republican evangelicals as well as Democratic liberals. Labeling politicians as “anti-Israel” or “pro-Palestinian” could discredit them. In AIPAC’s successful 1984 campaign to unseat Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.), for instance, one of the groups sent around a mailer describing Percy as “Israel’s worst adversary in Congress.”
But as Israel’s popularity has plummeted in the wake of its disproportionate response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre and to Israel’s continuing expansion in the Palestinian West Bank, the groups have had to resort to deception and diversion against Israel’s critics.
Instead of engaging the arguments of Israel’s critics, groups like the ADL, American Jewish Committee, the Adelson-backed Brandeis Center for Human Rights and Law, and watchdog groups like CAMERA and the Canary Mission began charging Israel’s critics with antisemitism. “Their goal was not to win debates about Israel,” Clifton and Lustick write, “but to prevent discussion about it.” They successfully lobbied the Biden and Trump administrations to endorse an official definition of antisemitism that included criticisms of Israel. The Trump administration used charges of antisemitism to bludgeon liberal universities and law firms they disliked. It would be surprising if Clifton and Lustick escape being charged with antisemitism for exposing the machinations of the Israel lobby.
The groups have also altered their campaign strategy. In their advertising, the UDP and allied PACs have eschewed mention of American policy toward Israel. Instead, they have attacked candidates they opposed by citing their stands on whatever issues might resonate with the relevant electorate. In their ads this year against Wahab, the groups advanced a spurious claim that she had made “teenage girls more vulnerable to predators” by opposing a sex trafficking bill in the state legislature.
In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, AIPAC ran ads claiming that Abdul El-Sayed “disrespected women.” None of the ads mentioned Israel. This tactic seemed to work in 2024 campaigns AIPAC and the groups waged against then-Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), but as the Iran War has deepened discontent with the U.S.-Israel alliance, it failed against Wahab and El-Sayed. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the general election, even requested that AIPAC drop its plans to support him with ads against El-Sayed.
As Clifton and Lustick show, the groups composing the Lobby have seen a sharp growth in their staffs and revenues over the quarter century. AIPAC and its educational foundation enjoyed a “fivefold increase in revenue between 2000 and 2022.” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (an AIPAC spinoff) increased its revenues from $5.2 million in 2001 to $21.9 million in 2023. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which led the charge in 2015 against the Iran nuclear pact, increased its annual haul from $1.12 million in 2001 to $17.8 million in 2022. Along with the megadonors, the Israel groups enjoy the support of wealthy foundations, including the $256 million Koret Foundation and the $220 million Swartz Foundation. But the growth of revenue has not been matched by a growth in influence. If anything, the lobby’s influence has declined, forcing it to resort to deceptive advertising and incendiary accusations.
There are two parts of Clifton’s and Lustick’s argument about which I wanted to read more. The first has to do with situating the lobby in American politics. Clifton and Lustick accept Mearsheimer and Walt’s definition of the Israel lobby as “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” That might have been OK in 2007, but in 2008, Jeremy Ben-Ami founded J Street, which billed itself as “pro-Israel,” and which has attempted to move American foreign policy in a completely different direction from AIPAC and the other “pro-Israel” groups that Mearsheimer and Walt had assigned to the lobby. The lobby Clifton and Lustick describe represents one interpretation of what it means to be “pro-Israel.”
As Clifton and Lustick note, the lobby has gradually shifted rightward in American politics and in its view of Israel. AIPAC, which was initially run by liberal Democrats and had its base in the Democratic Congress, began moving toward the Republicans in 1982, when it made Robert Asher its president. In 1993, it replaced its executive director Thomas Dine, a former aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), with Howard Kohr, a Republican operative. In its early days, AIPAC was aligned with Israel’s social-democratic Labor Party, but it has moved closer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its aim for a Greater Israel. It harried Barack Obama’s attempts to achieve a two-state solution. Its PAC has not merely targeted harsh critics of Israel like El-Sayed, but liberal Zionists like former Reps. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) and Tom Malinowksi (D-N.J.).
And it’s not just AIPAC. The constellation of groups is now weighted toward Republican proponents of a greater Israel. It includes Christians United for Israel, which boasts a larger membership than AIPAC; a revived, Adelson-funded Zionist Organization of America; and the Republican Jewish Coalition, which dwarfs its Democratic counterpart. The funders have also tilted rightward. In the 1970s, AIPAC’s president and major donor was real estate developer Larry Weinberg, a liberal Democrat close to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Clifton and Lustick’s lobby still includes major Democratic donors including Saban, but more of the money is coming from Trump supporters like Miriam Adelson, Yass, Singer, and Ellison.
In short, the lobby is increasingly part of a conservative, pro-Trump Republican faction that backs the right wing of Israel’s politics. It is opposed not only by the Democrats who support J Street — or beyond that, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — but also by a growing group of Republican conservatives who believe that in his support for Israel, Trump has betrayed his commitment to “America First.” I would have liked to know more about the political debates that took place inside AIPAC in the 1990s when it shifted most decisively rightward and in AIPAC and other groups during the Trump years.
What I would have also liked to read more about is the precise relationship between the lobby and the Israeli government. AIPAC, the main group in question, grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was founded in 1949 and was funded by the Israeli government. In 1963, in response to demands that it register as a foreign agent, AZC changed its name to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and rewrote its charter to exclude foreign contributions.
Since then, as far as is known, AIPAC has no financial or other legal ties to Israel’s government or institutions. But Clifton and Lustick suggest that the lobby is “the agent of a foreign power.” The title of their book is similarly provocative. They called it “Israel’s Lobby” rather than “The Israel Lobby,” and they subtitle the book, “America in the Grip of a Foreign Power.” That implies that the lobby is subordinate to the Israeli government, even if it is not financed or staffed by it.
They give one example of how that relationship has worked, citing a quote in a book about U.S.-Israel relations from an unnamed Israeli diplomat who served when George Shultz was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State. They wrote that the Israeli diplomat:
came up with the idea of “turning Israel into a Major Non-NATO Ally. We told AIPAC, which started rolling the idea up and down Capitol Hill corridors until it was accepted.”
They also cite what an Israel official, unaware that he was being recorded, said in 2015 to an American audience about the government’s efforts to get the Senate to oppose the Iran nuclear arms deal. “We have the FDD. We have others working on ...data gathering, working on activist organizations, money trail.”
They summarize the relationship in this way: “Israeli government operatives do not control the organizations ... Israeli officials send signals that guide the behavior and the rhetoric of Lobby leaders and thousands of activists.” But these two examples don’t go far enough in making that case. The first is from a single source decades ago, and the second is ambiguous. What does “having FDD” mean? One wants to know whether the staff or the leadership in these groups have relationships with people in Israeli government ministries who send them signals. Are there examples of Israel’s government persuading one of the groups to do something it had not thought of doing or was wary of undertaking?
Answering these questions about the group’s political evolution or its precise relationship to the Israeli government would have required trying to get people who have worked in these groups to talk candidly about what went on. That kind of journalism is, perhaps, beyond the call of duty for this book.
What Clifton and Lustick have provided is a comprehensive and much-needed account of how the groups and individuals that make up the lobby have attempted to influence American politics and policy. That’s quite an achievement, and anyone interested in America’s relationship with Israel should pick up Clifton and Lustick’s book.
https://a.co/d/03ZH2nwKThis review originally appeared in Responsible Statecraft.
So an "unnamed diplomat ... came up with the idea of 'turning Israel into a Major Non-NATO Ally. We told AIPAC, which started rolling the idea up and down Capitol Hill corridors until it was accepted.'" What does this mean? I'm sure plenty of diplomats come up with ideas all the time that do NOT prove acceptable, so why was this one an exception? Is it because Israeli influencers are inordinately clever? That Jews are arch manipulators from way back? Or is it simply that US and Israeli interests overlap in the Middle East and that American ruling circles decided on their own that a quasi-NATO status for the Jewish state would serve the United States well? Efforts at blaming it all on some nebulous Israeli lobby have one purpose only, which is to get US imperialism off the hook. This was my point when I panned the Walt-Mearsheimer book in the Nation way back in 2007 -- to the dismay of the Nation's editors, I might add.
Respectfully, Mr. Judis you have claimed that J Street seeks to turn American foreign policy in a different direction from AIPAC. Especially since October 7, the evidence would suggest that on issues of greatest importance J Street and AIPAC are more aligned than opposed.
The kayfabe here has always been the genuine enmity between two very closely aligned organizations. Just because j street and AIPAC hate each other, doesn’t mean they’re not fundamentally rowing in the same direction.
TrackAIPAC, for example, is correct to identify JStreetPac funding when reporting on politicians influence from the Israel lobby.
So yeah I think sophisticated folks understand that J Street is not in any meaningful way designed to change our foreign policy. They’re designed to give liberal Zionists a place to fe good — without ever fundamentally challenging the status quo.
Let’s be honest about that.