No, the US Doesn't Back Israel Because of AIPAC

Critical Studies

For at least half a century, the lobby's formidable power in deciding elections in Western countries and its influence on universities, the press, and cultural and educational institutions have been the subject of many books and articles.

Perhaps the first such treatment, albeit one that expressed mild criticisms of pro-Israel forces in the U.S., was an article that George Ball, the under secretary of state in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, published in Foreign Affairs in 1977.

Ball and his son later published a complete study of the matter in book form.

I have often argued that it is the very centrality of Israel to U.S. strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the Israel lobby and not the other way around.

Other books published in the next decade include Paul Findley's 1985 They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby. Findley was a former U.S. Republican congressman whose re-election campaign was defeated by the Israel lobby in 1982 after he had served 11 terms in the House of Representatives.

A former AIPAC president described Findley as "a dangerous enemy of Israel," which led to his political demise.

Another book, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy, by former Time Magazine writer Edward Tivnan, was published in 1987 and elaborated on the same theme.

However, it was not until the prominent mainstream political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published a paper in 2006 on the Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy, which they later expanded and published as a book in 2008, that its role in shaping policy became a major topic of discussion in the U.S. mainstream, even if only to defame its authors and defend the lobby against their cogent arguments.

In addition to objective assessments of the role of the Israel lobby, there exists a motley collection of antisemitic and white-supremacist conspiracy theories about the alleged influence of "the Jews" in Western countries and their alleged control of the U.S. government.

Pro-lobby commentators, however, use this as a cudgel to beat down those with valid criticisms of the Israel lobby that have nothing to do with antisemitism - a treatment meted out to Mearsheimer and Walt, among others.

Sane and reasonable discussions on the Israel lobby range between those who argue that absent the formidable influence of the lobby, U.S. policy towards the Middle East would be less hostile to the Palestinians, and those who believe that the lobby's influence does not extend beyond cheering and pushing existing U.S. policy further in the same direction to which it is beholden.

My view has always been more akin to the latter.

An 'Implacable Enemy'

The claim that the Israel lobby controls U.S. policy in the Middle East amounts to absolving the U.S. from responsibility for all its imperialist policies in the Arab world and the Middle East at large since World War Two.

Rather, it is Israel and its lobby that have pushed the U.S. to enact policies that are detrimental to its own national interests and only benefit Israel, the argument contends.That the U.S. blocks all international and U.N. support for Palestinian rights while it arms and finances Israel in its war against a civilian population and shields it from the wrath of the global community should also be blamed not on the U.S. and its Western allies but on Israel and its lobby, it further insists.

What this line of thinking elides is the reality that the U.S. government has never supported national liberation in the Third World.

The Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel were a communist or anti-imperialist country, or if Israel opposed U.S. policy elsewhere in the world.

The U.S. record is one of being the implacable enemy of all national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia.

Its backing of groups like the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Afghan revolutionary government and the Soviet Union; Unita and Renamo, the main terrorist allies of apartheid South Africa in Angola and Mozambique, against their respective anti-colonial revolutionary national governments; and the Contras against the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were all cases in which the U.S. was supporting counter-revolutionary groups intent on destroying national liberation revolutionary governments.

Why the U.S. would then support Palestinian national liberation absent the Israel lobby is something this argument fails to address.

When I first made these arguments two decades ago, a pro-Palestinian white Christian American academic objected to them in a conversation, insisting that the U.S. supported Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser against the 1956 tri-partite invasion of Egypt by France, Britain, and Israel.

But U.S. support in this orphan case, as I retorted to him, was premised on clipping the wings of France and Britain. These erstwhile empires thought they could still act imperially after the Second World War when it was the U.S. that rescued them from Nazi aggression.

The U.S. further opposed Israel's decision in that instance to coordinate its aggression on Egypt with these former empires rather than with its own government.

Israel soon realized that it could instead pursue the same aggression on its neighbours in coordination with the U.S. Expectedly, the U.S. did not object at all to any subsequent Israeli invasions (1967, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1985, etc) of neighboring Arab countries.

U.S. Imperial Interests

A related argument that the Israel lobby's influence on the U.S. government is what led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq is equally unpersuasive.

This is not to say that the lobby did not actively support the U.S.-led war effort (it certainly did). Still, it was ultimately pushing for a war that was already desired and planned by other American political and economic imperial interests with far superior influence.

The invasion of Iraq follows a consistent policy of the U.S. since the Second World War of overthrowing all regimes across the Third World that insist on controlling their national resources, whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals.

That the Israel lobby is more influential than any other foreign-policy lobby in the U.S. is not because it commands some fantastical power to steer the U.S. away from its "national interest." If anything, it only proves how important Israel is to U.S. grand strategy.

This extends from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, to the rest of Latin America, and all the way to present-day Venezuela and Iran.

Africa has fared much worse in the last six decades, as have countries in Asia.

The overthrow of regimes including Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz, Brazil's Joao Goulart, Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh, Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and Chile's Salvador Allende, and the attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, are prominent examples, as are the overthrow of nationalist regimes like Ahmad Sukarno's in Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah's in Ghana.

The terror unleashed on populations who challenged the U.S-imposed regimes from El Salvador and Nicaragua to the Congo, and later Zaire, Chile, and Indonesia resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, by repressive police and militaries trained for these important tasks by the U.S.

This is aside from direct U.S. invasions of Southeast Asian and Central American countries that killed untold millions for decades.

As the Israel lobby played no role in all these other invasions or interventions, why then would the U.S. not have invaded Iraq (or Afghanistan) or stopped threatening Iran on its own? These are policy questions that critics of the Israel lobby's perceived stranglehold on the U.S. government can never explain.

Such a line of argument would have been more convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the U.S. government to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent with its global policies elsewhere.

This is far from what happens, however.

Overlapping Agendas

While U.S. policies in the Middle East may often be an exaggerated form of its repressive and anti-democratic policies elsewhere in the world, they are not incongruent with them.

One could easily make the case that the strength of the Israel lobby is what actually accounts for this exaggeration, but even this contention is not entirely persuasive.

I have often argued that it is the very centrality of Israel to U.S. strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the Israel lobby and not the other way around.

Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its U.S. master for a good price, whether in channeling illegal arms to Central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s or helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period.

Indeed, some cite the role of pro-Israel, and especially pro-Likud, members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton administration), let alone those of Obama, Trump, or Biden, along with pro-Israel American billionaires, as evidence of the lobby's awesome power.

However, it could be argued that it is these U.S. politicians and billionaires who, since the 1990s, have pushed Likud and other Israeli political parties to embrace a more aggressive agenda. Such incitement persists today amid Israel's genocidal war on the Palestinians of Gaza.

This is not to suggest that Israel lobby leaders do not regularly boast of their crucial influence on U.S. policy in Congress and the White House.

They most recently celebrated their success in defeating Bowman and have regularly bragged about their role since the late 1970s.

But the lobby is powerful in the U.S. because its major claims are about advancing U.S. interests, and its support for Israel is contextualized in its support for U.S. militarism and its overall strategy in the Middle East.

The Israel lobby plays the same role today that the China lobby played in the 1950s in support of Taiwan against the People's Republic of China, and the Cuba lobby still plays against Cuba's revolutionary government and in support of counter-revolutionary Cuban exiles.

That the Israel lobby is more influential than any other foreign-policy lobby in the U.S. is not because it commands some fantastical power to steer the U.S. away from its "national interest." If anything, it only proves how important Israel is to U.S. grand strategy.

The Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel were a communist or anti-imperialist country, or if Israel opposed U.S. policy elsewhere in the world. Indeed, this would be a laughable proposition.

Arab Approval

Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap its interests with those of the U.S., its lobby deliberately misleads U.S. policymakers and shifts their position from one of objective assessment of what is truly in America's best interests and that of Israel's.

The argument has it that U.S. support for Israel leads political and militant groups in the Middle East who oppose Israel to become hostile to the U.S. itself and to target it for attacks.

Such support also costs the U.S. the loss of friendly media coverage in the Arab world, impacts its investment potential in Arab countries, and weakens its Arab regional allies.

As the Israel lobby's most formidable force, AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar as it pushes for policies that accord with U.S. interests and are resonant with the reigning U.S. imperial ideology.

But none of this is necessarily true.The U.S. has been able to be Israel's biggest backer and financier and its staunchest defender and weapons supplier while maintaining strategic alliances with most, if not all, Arab dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority, under both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

Indeed, the more intransigent the U.S. is in supporting Israel's current genocide of the Palestinians, the more it is embraced by its Arab puppet rulers.

Moreover, U.S. companies and investments have the largest presence across the Arab world, most prominently, but not exclusively, in the oil sector.

A whole army of Arabic newspapers, private and state-run television stations, and myriad satellite television stations owned by Arab Gulf princes, not to mention massive websites and internet news outlets funded by western NGOs, are deployed to promote the U.S. point of view.

They celebrate American culture, broadcast its television programs, and attempt to sell U.S. positions as effectively as possible, encumbered only by the limitations that actual U.S. policies in the region would place on common sense.

Even the offendingAl Jazeera network has bent over backwards to accommodate the U.S. point of view but, again, is often undercut by actual U.S. policies in the region.

Under tremendous pressure and threats of bombing from the U.S. during its invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeerastopped referring to the U.S. military in Iraq as "occupation forces," shifting to "coalition forces."

Mutual Benefits

Between October 7 2023 and January 2024, the U.S. spent $1.6 billion on its military build-up in the Middle East to defend its imperial interests. Between 2001 and 2019, the U.S. spent $6.4 trillion on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan alone.

Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its U.S. master for a good price, whether in channeling illegal arms to Central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s or helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period.

It has additionally supported pro-U.S., including fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan.

It is only in the absence of harmful U.S. policies, not the lobby that supports them, that the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians can stop.

It has come to the aid of conservative pro-U.S. Arab regimes when threatened, as it did in Jordan in 1970. And it outright attacked Arab nationalist regimes in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed the country's nuclear reactor.

Whereas the U.S. had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups in the mid-1960s, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralized him in the 1967 war.

It is thanks to this major service that the U.S. increased its support to Israel exponentially.

Moreover, Israel's neutralization of the PLO in 1982 was no small service to many Arab regimes and their U.S. patron, which could not fully control the organisation until then.

None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record.

Some might push back, arguing that if this were true, then why did the U.S. have to intervene directly in Kuwait and Iraq?

In those instances, direct U.S. intervention was needed as it could not rely on Israel to do the job due to the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition, which would embarrass Arab allies. While this may have shown Israel's uselessness as a strategic ally, the U.S. also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army to finish the job.

U.S. bases in the Gulf did provide essential support, but so did Israel.

It is true that Operation al-Aqsa Flood has completely overturned Israel's strategic military importance to the U.S.

Israel's military defeat against the Palestinian resistance continues to necessitate American and British military help. Its calls for Western support began as early as October 8 to prop up its military might, with additional requests for backup in April.

The U.S., the U.K., and U.S. bases in Jordan did most of the work in defending Israel against Iranian missile retaliation following Israel's bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

Still, for the U.S., Israel's manifest weaknesses have not altered the role it plays in the region. This includes the destruction of all resistance to U.S. interests and anything that would undermine its strategy, including Israel's place within it.

Exaggerated Claims

As the Israel lobby's most formidable force, AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar as it pushes for policies that accord with U.S. interests and are resonant with the reigning U.S. imperial ideology.

The last nine months have made amply clear that the power of the Israel lobby, whether in Washington or on university campuses, is not based solely on its organizational skills or ideological uniformity.

In no small measure, antisemitic attitudes among congressional leaders, policymakers, and university administrators underpin their beliefs in the lobby's exaggerated claims—and those of its enemies'—about its actual power, resulting in their toeing the line.

The U.S. government and its Western allies are the ones who bear full responsibility for abetting, supplying, and defending Israel's right to commit genocide against the Palestinians.

In such a context, it does not matter if the lobby has real or imagined power. As long as government leaders and, more notably, university administrators believe it does based on their antisemitic bias or objective assessments, it will remain effective and powerful.

Some might then ask: Without such influence of a powerful Israel lobby, what would have been different about U.S. policy in the Middle East?

The answer, in short, is the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such U.S. policies.

So, is the Israel lobby extremely powerful in the U.S.?

As someone who has been facing the full brunt of its power for the past two decades, through its outsized influence on my own university and intense pressure campaigns to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes.

Is the lobby primarily responsible for U.S. policies toward the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not.

The Arab world, and especially Palestinians, oppose the U.S. because of its history of pursuing policies that are inimical to the interests of most people in those countries.

Its sole objective has been to safeguard its own interests and the minority regimes in the region that serve those interests, including Israel.

It is only in the absence of harmful U.S. policies, not the lobby that supports them, that the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians can stop.

The U.S. government and its Western allies are the ones who bear full responsibility for abetting, supplying, and defending Israel's right to commit genocide against the Palestinians.

The efforts of the Israel lobby to have the U.S. support Israel even more than it does is a complicitous act in the ongoing genocide, but it certainly is not the principal cause of this monstrous crime.