Debate around the so-called Jewish or Israeli lobby in the United States continues to generate considerable noise among elite circles, particularly at the level of defining it as a term and clarifying what it actually refers to, precisely or approximately. Confusion and ambiguity dominate attempts to explain the rationale behind its relationship with successive US administrations.
Less vocal perspectives tend to distinguish between Jewish pressure groups and pro-Israel lobbying organisations. From this viewpoint, conflating Judaism with the current State of Israel may itself constitute a clear form of antisemitism.
It is widely believed that this conflation is deliberately promoted by a system of genocide to silence all opposition and force everyone into a constant state of fear.
Side discussions across Western forums largely agree that the State of Israel does not represent the interests of all Jews. By the same logic, there are powerful Islamic lobbying groups and evangelical Christian lobbying groups in America, yet this does not mean they represent every Muslim or every Christian.
Many Jews in the diaspora oppose the State of Israel. A significant portion of Israel’s support instead comes from an antisemitic evangelical Christian movement that backs Israel based on biblical prophecies.
This movement believes that the establishment of Israel will lead to the second coming of Christ, after which all Jews will either convert to Christianity or be annihilated and subjected to eternal punishment. This position was evident in heated discussions I personally followed on the popular Reddit forum dedicated to the works of the well-known Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
Statements made by former US President Joe Biden following the Al Aqsa Flood operation are key to understanding the American mindset and its position on the Middle East. He stated with pride: “If Israel did not exist, we would have to invent it.”
This current argues that older American Jews who are more committed to Orthodox teachings tend to support the State of Israel, while support among younger, non-Orthodox American Jews is noticeably weaker.
They cite the contrast between the notorious organisation AIPAC and the organisation J Street, which tends to donate to moderate Democrats who advocate a two-state solution.
In their joint book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and international relations professor Stephen Walt argue that the axis of US policy toward the Middle East is its close relationship with Israel.
The two scholars point out that although this commitment is often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or urgent moral imperatives, the United States’ commitment to Israel is primarily driven by the activities of pro-Israel lobbying groups, often at the expense of US interests.
They questioned the value of the special relationship between the United States and Israel, describing it as hostile to America’s strategic and international interests worldwide.
Nevertheless, Stephen Walt stated clearly: “We never use the term Jewish lobby, because a lobby is defined by its political agenda, not by religion or ethnicity.”
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times responding to a review of their book by the prominent American journalist and politician Leslie Gelb, the authors wrote: “Gelb repeatedly refers to the Jewish lobby even though we never once used this term in our book. We explicitly reject this misleading and inaccurate label, because the lobby includes Jews as well as Christian Zionists, and because many American Jews do not support the hard-line policies preferred by the lobby’s most powerful figures.”
The book, which topped The New York Times bestseller list in 2007, is regarded by many critics of Israel as an established truth, while others see it as propaganda that distorts reality and presents the myth of a Jewish lobby as an unquestionable fact.
In the Arab world, however, the book has remained far less popular than They Dare to Speak Out by former US Congressman Paul Findley. Findley’s work achieved exaggerated levels of reverence and attention among Arab intellectuals through extensive translation and publication. When he died in 2019, a large segment of the Arab elite eulogised him across widely circulated newspapers.
Findley’s book adopted a more aggressive and confrontational tone toward successive US administrations and their relationships with Israel, relationships he described as devoid of logic, interest, and morality.
He went as far as claiming that the US Congress was nothing more than an extension of Israel’s Likud Party, and that the United States effectively had two governments: a domestic one headed by an American president, and a foreign policy government headed by AIPAC.
Most academic studies examining this phenomenon have remained cautious, limiting themselves to redefining terminology for legal reasons and monitoring its effects, which naturally led to criticism of US authorities. They did not, however, penetrate the core of the phenomenon or attempt to test and explain it empirically.
The very fact that such books can be published, openly discussing the power of the Jewish or Israeli lobby without their authors being harmed or their works confiscated, in itself signals the opposite and implicitly undermines narratives about an all-powerful lobby with an unchecked reach.
Findley himself, for example, remained a member of Congress for 22 years, and the Jewish lobby was unable to punish him electorally or remove him from office, as The New York Times noted in its obituary of him.
Similarly, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt continued their careers as respected professors at leading academic institutions without any harassment from the Jewish lobby, despite the presence of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the largest pro-Israel lobbying groups with significant influence over governments, media outlets, universities, schools, law enforcement agencies, and the private sector. The organisation runs numerous training and educational programs and maintains networks of local organisers and lobbyists.
The Anti-Defamation League has long conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism, according to Zachary Foster, an American historian specialising in the history of Palestine and the Middle East.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, American political analyst David Frum asked: if Jewish influence explains US policy in the Middle East, how do we explain the behaviour of Clinton and Nixon? How do we explain the conduct of George W Bush? Modern presidential candidates have rarely received less Jewish support than Bush did in November 2000, when it stood at around 19 per cent.
Former President Bill Clinton, for instance, was among the most openly friendly presidents toward American Jews. No previous president appointed such a large number of individuals of Jewish background or faith to so many senior positions, including Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, William Cohen, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Nussbaum, Robert Reich, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers.
In return, the American Jewish community showed Clinton considerable affection. He raised tens of millions of dollars from Jewish donors in Hollywood and New York, culminating in an eight-million-dollar donation from entertainment magnate Haim Saban to build a new Democratic Party headquarters, as well as more than five hundred thousand dollars from Dennis Rich for his presidential library.
Yet Clinton’s positions were among the toughest toward Israeli policies in the Middle East. He exerted strong pressure on Israel to evacuate the West Bank and Gaza Strip to establish a Palestinian state. He received Yasser Arafat more frequently than any other world leader, including the British prime minister and the Russian president. He also responded to the Al Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 by pressing Israel to make more radical unilateral concessions.
By contrast, Richard Nixon did not conceal his antisemitism. He kept lists of Jews in the media and within his administration and never forgave even his closest adviser, Henry Kissinger, for his religion. Yet Nixon was the president who resupplied Israel at its darkest hour in October 1973, saving it from catastrophic defeat in the early hours of the Yom Kippur War.
In the same context, when the US House of Representatives voted in December 2023 in favour of a resolution equating anti Zionism with antisemitism, and lawmakers entered a long standing Jewish debate over the meaning of Jewish identity, American Jewish investigative journalist Yasha Levine revived the question of why Israel and its Jewish nationalist ideology enjoy such overwhelming support across nearly all public and private institutions in America, from university presidents to small town mayors, from the US president to almost all major and minor corporations.
Levine rejected the prevailing narrative of an all-encompassing Jewish lobby dominating US sovereign decision-making. Instead, he attributed this phenomenon to what he described as the American empire’s use of foreign nationalist movements as instruments, among which the emerging Jewish state in Palestine was included.
He argued that open US support for Israel is not due to the strength of the Jewish lobby, but because it genuinely serves American interests and those of numerous influential forces, some of which are cultural and racial in essence. Levine summarised this view by stating: “Israel is run by people who look like us, meaning whites, Jews, and Christians, in a region dominated by people who do not look like us, meaning Muslims, dark-skinned, non-Europeans, who generally do not accept the way the United States exercises its power.
“There are also administrative factors: outsourcing regional imperial control. Israel excels at destabilising hostile forces such as Iran and Syria, and at restraining Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. It is also a weapons laboratory and a vast testing ground. Then there are Christian Zionists who are waiting for the ultimate prize, the coming of Jesus. So there are many overlapping elements at play.”
It is also worth noting here that we may not have fully grasped the significance of former President Joe Biden’s remarks during his visit to Israel immediately after 7 October 2023. These remarks are arguably the most dangerous of all and constitute the key to understanding what has long eluded us regarding the American mindset and its position on the Middle East.
He stated with blunt clarity and defiance, summarising the essence of the relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington: “If Israel did not exist, we would have to invent it.”
The issue here, in all likelihood, does not relate to Jewish religious doctrine or the myths surrounding a so-called Jewish lobby. Rather, it concerns function and utility embedded within the agenda of major policy makers in the United States, namely, interests.
