A new book revisits the contentious case that Israel’s friends wield too much influence in Washington. Yet the roots of America’s attachment to Israel run deeper. Harry Truman's recognition of Israel in 1948 remains an early test of the competing forces that shaped America's relationship with the Jewish state. By now, William Faulkner’s iconic observation in Requiem for a Nun that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” has achieved gold cliché status, being quoted ad nauseam by historians and commentators in every form of media. Of all the modern conflicts, the Israeli-Palestinian one seems stubbornly intent on proving Faulkner right. This conflict has weaponized yesterday so thoroughly that tomorrow barely stands a chance. The grinding stalemate with Iran has also raised the most persistent question in America’s Middle East policy: why has Washington remained so unusually committed to Israel, even when an American administration believes that Israeli policy is frustrating American aims? Is Washington pursuing its own interests, or somebody else’s? A new book has once again turned the spotlight on the so-called ‘Israel Lobby’ and its allegedly Svengalian grip on the United States. Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s just released Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power is a sharp and punchy addition to a growing body of literature that argues that the lobby exerts a detrimental influence on U.S. foreign policy. This strain of literature dates back at least to the first Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s, reaching its high-water mark in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007). In 2006, international relations scholars Mearsheimer and Walt had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic to write about the Israel lobby, but the magazine ultimately rejected the essay. The essay found its way instead to the London Review of Books, which published “The Israel Lobby” in March that year. The essay proved hugely controversial (as expected); according to its authors, it breached what they regarded as a ‘taboo’ in American foreign-policy debate – namely, the reluctance to openly scrutinize the influence of pro-Israel organisations on Washington. The explosive controversy eventually led the authors to expand their essay into a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, in 2007. Special Relationship For Mearsheimer and Walt, the central puzzle was why the world’s greatest power behaved as though it was unable to use its enormous leverage over a much smaller ally? Why side so consistently with Israel, a small and resource-poor state, rather than with a much larger Arab world containing some of the planet’s most important oil reserves? Mearsheimer and Walt claimed the answer was allegedly the ‘Israel Lobby.’ According to Walt, “The existence of a special relationship - one of nearly unconditional and generous American support - is due almost entirely to the activities of the Israel lobby.” Without the lobby, he argued, America and Israel would probably still be friendly, perhaps even de facto allies. But they would not possess such a profound relationship. According to him, the only way to understand the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Israel is to examine the critical role specific organizations have played in actively promoting it over the past 60 years. While Washington supported Israel upon its founding in 1948, it did not forge this unique bond for the first two decades. While the U.S. backed Israel at times, it also applied heavy pressure when necessary and provided little economic or military aid before 1967. According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the situation has changed drastically today, as Washington reportedly backs Israel almost unconditionally, with American politicians carefully avoiding public criticism even when Israeli policy conflicts with U.S. interests and values. AIPAC has become a lightning rod in the debate over the Lobby’s influence. Without key groups like AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], the Conference of Presidents, the Anti-Defamation League, and Christian Zionist that make up the so-called Lobby, the U.S. and Israel might still be friendly de facto allies but they would not share the nearly unconditional, extraordinarily generous bond they do today. The authors argued that the Lobby also provides a plausible explanation for Washington’s inability to act decisively against Israeli settlement expansion which the United States has repeatedly regarded as obstacles to peace with the Palestinians. According to Walt, the two-state solution, was once attainable but was squandered by mistakes on all sides and by an American diplomacy too often unwilling to pressure Israel. Earlier, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s former foreign minister, had identified Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush as the American presidents who did most to advance Arab-Israeli peace. Their virtue, as per Ben-Ami, was precisely that they were prepared to pressure Israel as well as its Arab interlocutors. Aaron David Miller made the criticism more memorably in his 2008 book The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace when he quipped that too often, American diplomacy acted as “Israel's lawyer.” Now, building upon this work, Clifton and Lustick, both American Jews, have launched a rigorous dissection of the Lobby by “following the money” and detailing donors, campaign finance, think-tank influence, electoral pressure and the politics of accusation. They argue that pro-Israel organisations and donors have at various times pressured presidents, influenced legislators, supported political campaigns and helped narrow the permissible range of debate. They are particularly concerned with what they regard as the deployment of accusations of antisemitism to marginalise critics of Israeli government policy, and with the political networks that have encouraged anti-Palestinian rhetoric. “Israel’s Lobby,” write Clifton and Lustick, “has become an out-of-control foreign influence operation,” channelling some of the “most extreme impulses” of contemporary Israeli politics into American policymaking. But the book is strongest when it avoids the openly crude proposition that Israel somehow ‘controls’ America. It does not equate American Jews with Israel, nor does it treat the lobby as a single, homogeneous organism. Its more interesting claim is that American politicians operate within a political environment in which challenging Israeli policy can carry unusually high costs. In 1948 Harry Truman was caught between advisers such as Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who feared that recognising a Jewish state would destabilise the Middle East and damage American relations with the Arab world, and political advisers and Zionist campaigners pressing for recognition. Truman was deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but he was also exasperated by the lobbying campaign. On May 12, just days before Israel's declaration of independence, Marshall warned him against premature recognition. Eleven minutes after Israel declared independence on May 14, Truman recognised the new state. Recurring Pattern Clifton and Lustick see in the episode the prototype of a recurring pattern where an American president is pulled between strategic calculations and domestic political pressures. The pattern recurred again in 1975, when President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, exasperated by Israel's resistance to their peace diplomacy, launched a broader “reassessment” of American policy in the Middle East. The response from Capitol Hill was swift. In May, 76 senators wrote to Ford reaffirming America's commitment to Israel and opposing the administration’s effort to use American aid and diplomatic support as leverage in negotiations with Egypt. For Ford, the episode was a striking demonstration of how quickly Middle Eastern diplomacy could become an American political hot potato. He later recalled that the senators had urged him to recommend $2.6 billion in aid to Israel even without Israeli participation in the negotiations. Gerald Ford (pointing) and Henry Kissinger (standing) sought to use American leverage to press Israel towards a wider Middle East settlement in 1975, provoking a powerful backlash on Capitol Hill. Jimmy Carter, who was prepared to speak more openly about Palestinian rights and press both sides in the search for a comprehensive settlement, encountered similar constraints. George H.W. Bush and James Baker were more willing to confront Israel, most famously over loan guarantees intended to discourage settlement activity with Bush publicly complaining about powerful lobbying groups in Congress. The authors claim that Barack Obama’s administration offers another version of the same story. His administration began with an attempt to revive the two-state solution, but its room for manoeuvre diminished as the White House confronted an Israeli government increasingly confident of congressional support. Timothy Weber’s On the Road to Armageddon (2004) traces the theological roots of evangelical support for Israel to nineteenth-century dispensationalism. For some evangelicals, the return of Jews to the Holy Land and Israel’s capture of Jerusalem in 1967 became signs of an approaching biblical fulfilment. While the ‘Christian Zionists’ are way less influential than AIPAC, their presence has led hardline Israeli politicians and American evangelicals finding common ground since the 1980s. And yet, the Israel Lobby theory has a problem in possibly confusing political reinforcement with historical cause. If the Israel lobby deserves scrutiny, so do the other foreign interests that have learned to work their way into American institutions. Qatar is an instructive case. The emirate has become the largest foreign source of disclosed funding to American universities, while maintaining its longstanding relationship with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Its money has flowed into some of America’s most prestigious institutions, which have witnessed demonstrations marked by explicit antisemitism. The same asymmetry distorts discussions of the October 7, 2023 attacks. Whatever the failures of the Netanyahu government’s policy towards Gaza, the war began because Hamas and its affiliates launched the brutal assault. If the Israel Lobby deserves scrutiny, so does Qatar’s financial relationship with Hamas, and the policy by which Qatari money was allowed into Gaza, as does the intellectual habit of treating Palestinian agency as though it were merely the product of Israeli policy. Deeper Explanation This is where Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People offers a solid counterweight to the pro-Lobby advocates. Published in 2022, Mead’s formidable and immensely erudite book questions whether the influence of a so-called ‘Israel Lobby’ explains the special relationship the two countries share in the first place. Mead observes that American society had already developed unusually deep affinities with the Zionist idea. He traces those affinities far back beyond the creation of Israel. He identifies an inheritance of “mental habits, cultural predispositions, and unspoken assumptions” rooted in Christianity and the American tradition of freedom. Mead’s argument rests on four propositions: that political and economic freedom foster prosperity; that the spread of freedom is compatible with human nature and represents the direction of history; that America is an exceptional nation with a providential role; and that America’s obligations require it both to preserve freedom at home and promote it abroad. These ideas have obvious implications for Israel. Early American Protestants understood their own national story partly through the biblical story of Israel. They saw themselves as a chosen people bound by covenant. The idea of a Jewish people returning to its ancestral homeland was therefore not an alien geopolitical proposition to generations of Americans steeped in the Bible. Zionism arrived in an intellectual landscape that was already prepared to understand it. Mead then expands his thesis through the collapse of the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, two world wars, the Holocaust and the emergence of an American conception of global order. As America’s responsibilities grew, preserving the “American way of life” came to mean preserving an international system broadly friendly to freedom. Seen this way, Truman’s recognition of Israel looks rather different. Mead brilliantly reconstructs the domestic and geopolitical considerations that led Truman to recognise the Jewish state just eleven minutes after its declaration of independence. The decision was not simply the victory of a ‘lobby’ over the State Department. It was the product of competing pressures including domestic politics, sincere humanitarian sentiment after the Holocaust, strategic calculations and America’s evolving understanding of its role in the postwar world. There is another complication here. Mearsheimer and Walt’s suggestion that the Iraq war demonstrated the lobby’s ability to drag America into an Israeli war becomes difficult to sustain as by 2003, Israel was increasingly concerned with Iran rather than Saddam Hussein. Saudi interests, oil interests, neoconservative ideology, the trauma of September 9/11 and the Bush administration’s own conception of the Middle East were all key factors. To attribute the 2003 Iraqi invasion primarily to the Israel Lobby is reductive, to say the least. Mead’s book essentially says that if foreign policy is not made by geopolitics alone, neither is it made by lobbyists. The Israeli side of the story, meanwhile, has become no less complicated. Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman’s Catch-67 offers an unusually trenchant description of Israel’s own ideological paralysis. The Israeli right, Goodman argues, has moved away from its earlier liberalism towards a more messianic politics. The left abandoned much of its original social-justice language and invested heavily in the expectation that peace was just around the corner. Israel is also politically trapped between demography and security. Continued control over Judea and Samaria may serve powerful security arguments, but the growth of the Palestinian population threatens the long-term viability of a state that wishes simultaneously to be Jewish and democratic. As Goodman puts it, the dilemma is not easily solved as relinquishing territory can appear dangerous for security purposes, while permanently controlling another people is morally and politically corrosive. Whatever responsibility Palestinians bear for rejectionism and the failures of their leadership, Israel’s predicament cannot be dissolved by declaring the Palestinian question illegitimate. Approximately 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank exercise substantial autonomy, yet ultimately live within a political order controlled by Israel. National-security considerations may justify aspects of that control but do not erase the contradiction between permanent domination and Israel’s self-understanding as a free, democratic and Jewish state. This is where the debate over the Israel Lobby becomes inseparable from the larger question of what America should want from Israel and what Israel should want from itself. The real question, perhaps, is not whether the Israel Lobby exists nor whether Israel has influence in Washington. Of course it does. The more difficult question is whether American support has become so politically insulated that Washington can no longer distinguish an alliance from an obligation and Israel’s interests from America’s own. That is also one that the history of this relationship refuses to let America evade
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