The Israel lobby in the US or: Why America loves its genocidal outpost in the Middle East

The American readiness to follow the Israeli lead has become Pavlovian.

Map showing US states where anti-BDS legislation has passed, is pending, or has failed as of January 2024.

In 37 of the 50 states in the United States of America, you cannot legally boycott Israel. In these states, you can, however, boycott any other country in the world, including the United States of America.

It makes one wonder who the United States serves. Does it serve its 331.9 million citizens, or does it exist merely to support, protect, and uphold the interests of the roughly 7.2 million Jewish citizens of the State of Israel?

Not just in its anti-boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) laws, but many other metrics point to the United States preferring Israel over its own citizens. Consider these:

• The US provides $3.8 billion in aid to Israel every year

• It sends emergency aid whenever Israel asks for it

• It gives military equipment whenever Israel demands

• The US even bypasses Congressional approvals to send military equipment to Israel while it commits genocide

• The US — with its allies in Europe — goes to war with one of the world’s poorest countries — without Congressional approval — for its refusal to allow shipments to Israel while it commits genocide

• Israeli citizens get free healthcare, while Americans go bankrupt paying their medical bills

For all of these — and many more — it is the American taxpayer, struggling with inflation, ever-worsening living conditions, and an ill-funded, crumbling domestic infrastructure, who is footing the bill.

In effect, the average American taxpayer is paying for an Israeli’s healthcare, infrastructure, security, and desire for wanton killing of people he doesn’t like and whom he considers subhuman. What does the American taxpayer get in return? Nothing more than exhortations from the Democrats and the Republicans alike to get off his bum and work harder.

The American politicians never pretended to hide their love for Israel in the past. They have become even more brazen now. Brian Mast, a Republican Congressman from Florida who has volunteered for the Israeli army, last October made an appearance at Capitol Hill in Israeli military uniform. Notably, he has received nearly half a million dollars from the Israel lobby.

American Congressman Brian Mast appears at Capitol Hill dressed in Israeli military fatigue.

Furthermore, if you tune in to the presidential nomination debates among the prospective candidates, you could be excused for thinking they were in a race to replace Benjamin Netanyahu in Beit Aghion and not Joe Biden in the White House.

Click on the photo to watch the video on Twitter.

Has the American political establishment lost its mind? There is no economic reason for supporting a country thousands of miles away. And there can never be any moral justification for helping someone in starving, looting, bombing, and exterminating an occupied population that has been subjugated in its own land for over seven decades. What, then, explains the United States’s unwavering support for Israel?

There are several explanations to this question. One is the inherently antisemitic Christian Zionist movement, whose origin can be traced back to the 16th century and which seeks to send all Jews to the Holy Land to expedite the end times. The evangelicals in the US remain as zealous as ever in their support of Israel.

Another is the need for the American empire to have an imperial outpost in the resource-rich Middle East. None other than the current nominal head of the American empire, Joe Biden, has been for decades talking publicly about the need to “invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region” if it didn’t exist.

Whatever the explanations, there’s one factor that ensures that the American support of Israel never diminishes and endures — as University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer says — “forever.” That factor is the Israel lobby.

Unmasking the Israel lobby

Two Al Jazeera documentary series titled The Lobby - UK and The Lobby - US — filmed over several months in 2016 — revealed the workings of the powerful Israeli lobby groups in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. The series were a result of two undercover Al Jazeera journalists with hidden cameras infiltrating various pro-Israel lobby groups in the UK and the US around the same time in 2016 to film operatives and their modus operandi as they went about influencing politics, policymaking, and public opinion in favour of Israel using myriad subterfuges.

The release of The Lobby - UK caused significant uproar in Britain. However — and as if to prove the point of the series — The Lobby - US was entirely ignored by the mainstream American media despite its scandalous revelations.

Watch the documentary series here:

The many layers of the Israel lobby

The Lobby - US reveals a strikingly sophisticated operation to influence American political discourse in favour of Israel. Israeli lobby groups operate at nearly all levels of the American polity, beginning at campus politics and going all the way up to influence the government.

While the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most well-known of the Israeli lobby groups, the sheer number of unregistered pro-Israel organisations in the United States with names that don’t give away the true nature of their operation is something to marvel at. The David Project, The Israel Project (TIP), StandWithUs, the Israel on Campus Coalition, Canary Mission, Maccabee Task Force, the Global Coalition for Israel, Hillel, and Ha Lev are just some of the groups that appear in the series. The total number of such groups would easily number in the hundreds. It should also be noted that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States isn’t a monolith or a hierarchical movement. There are internal differences among various lobby groups, but they have one thing in common: Israel first, even if such advocacy comes at the expense of the US.

The pro-Israel discourse in the West in the aftermath of the events of October 7 has been a testament to how the Israeli lobby functions to twist the narratives in favour of the only genocidal state in the Middle East.

In the documentary series, Jacob Baime, the then-Executive Director of the lobby group Israel on Campus Coalition, discloses how his group uses Israeli-made state-of-the-art technology so powerful that “within about 30 seconds or less of one of these things popping up on campus, whether it’s a Facebook event, whether it’s the right kind of mention on Twitter — the system picks it up, it goes into a queue and alerts our researchers and they evaluate it. They tag it, and if it rises to a certain level, we issue early warning alerts to our partners.”

If you meditate on Baime’s statement, he is boasting about using military-grade technology to smear university students.

Soon after October 7, there were many pro-Palestine protests across American universities, which the supporters of Israel were quick to denounce. They smeared the pro-Palestine student protesters and attempted to make them unemployable. One tactic was putting their faces on trucks with digital billboards and the caption “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites.” The pro-Israel crowd, led by Bill Ackman, ultimately succeeded in getting the Presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to resign from their roles because of their inaction in preventing their students from exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to protest.

The series lays bare how pro-Israel university students intimidate pro-Palestine students on US campuses. How they turn losing resolutions into media events and then publish — as one operative admits — pre-written op-eds in tens of sympathetic “major news sources” to turn the discourse totally in favour of Israeli interests.

The Lobby - US shows how these groups, with links that go right up to the Israeli government, astroturf pro-Palestine protests with paid, disinterested pro-Israel “protesters” who attempt to rile their rivals with incendiary statements, then use the resulting footage for propaganda purposes. In one instructive clip from the series, Yaer Lerman Mazaar, an operative from one of the myriad pro-Israel lobby groups, tells the pro-Israeli protesters to stick to the message that “SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] is a hate group. BDS is a hate movement.”

If you have ever wondered how the Western media turns even the most egregious Israeli violation of Palestinian rights into a pro-Israel news story, this documentary answers it. It reveals how the Israeli lobby groups run a media wing from Jerusalem to ensure that they are the first at every security incident, filming its aftermath, interviewing the witnesses, and then passing on their footage to the Jerusalem bureaus of American media houses scrambling to cover such incidents. This first-to-the-scene operation ensures that the Israeli point of view is the only one that gets broadcast to the Western audience. As the former CNN journalist Jim Clancy points out in the series, there is never an attempt to get a Palestinian voice in these stories.

During the ongoing Gaza genocide, it has become nearly official that CNN has its reports vetted by the Israeli military, which certifies if they are fit for public consumption.

The Al Jazeera series lays bare the ingenious propaganda techniques employed by the Israeli lobbies. One operative named Jordan Schachtel, who worked with the lobby group The Israel Project on social media campaigns, reveals how they use seemingly innocuous social media handles with fluffy names like Cup of Jane (ostensibly for feminist content), Soul Mama (spiritual), History Bites (history), We Only Have One Earth (environment), and This Explains That (current affairs), where the vast majority of posts — although mind-numbingly stupid — are about the topics that they claim to be about, but their ultimate purpose is to slip in pro-Israel propaganda.

Take, for example, this post on Cup of Jane: A photo of a smiling woman in Israeli military fatigue with the caption “Girl power — the only thing ISIS is afraid of.”

Amidst a raft of feminist posts, this post sells an occupation in the name of feminism.

This is the aim. The other posts are mere smokescreens.

Schachtel admits to the covert Al Jazeera journalist, “A lot of it is just random topics, and then maybe 25 percent of it would be Israel- or Jewish-based.”

He also reveals the thinking behind this glut of seemingly harmless but well-disguised pro-Israel social media channels: “We have a lot of side projects that we are trying to influence the public debate with…we don’t want people to know that these side projects are associated with The Israel Project.”

Influencing elections

Jim Moran, a Democrat from West Virginia who fell foul of the Israeli lobby, talks about the way the group influences domestic US politics and how it put paid to his political career.

“They have a questionnaire; anybody running for Congress is expected to fill out a questionnaire. They evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of that questionnaire. Then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC’s support, then more often than not, you are gonna win.”

What happens if you fall afoul of AIPAC as Moran did for his refusal to vote for the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq? He answers:

“A Jewish woman stood up at a town hall, and she said, ‘Why aren’t more Jews involved in the marches against the war?’ and I said if the leaders of the Jewish community were opposed to the war, I think that would make a difference.”

That was it for Moran. He goes on:

“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume by AIPAC, and he warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the [Washington] Post. And sure enough, the Washington Post editorialised brutally. Everybody ganged up.”

The smear campaign against Jim Moran was led by The Washington Post.

When the covert Al Jazeera journalist asks Eric Gallagher of The Israel Project about the main outlets that TIP works with. Gallagher was prompt: “Washington Post is the biggest one.”

Getting the US into the Iraq war was a matter of immense importance to the Israel lobby. As Mearsheimer, and his co-author Stephen Walt write in their seminal book on the lobby titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy:

“Pressure from Israel and the lobby was not the only factor behind the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a crucial element.”

In the series, Mearsheimer lays out the reason why people of conscience like Moran will have a hard time going against issues dear to the Israel lobby:

“If you…become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find somebody to run against you and support that person very generously, and the end result is that you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”

Playing around with campaign finance laws

Furthermore, the series reveals how the lobby skirts around campaign finance laws. At fund-raising events, it collects credit cards from tens of pro-Israel donors and hands them over to politicians deemed sufficiently pro-Israel, telling them to swipe each card for the maximum amount legally allowed ($2,700 at the time, now $3,300). This way, there would be no way to tell that all these donors were working in tandem, which would violate the earmarking law.

Another way the lobby operates is by getting a large number of donors at fundraising events where if each attendee donates the maximum of $2,700, the total can easily run up to a quarter of a million dollars, which, in the words of a lobbying reform activist quoted in the series, “buys a lawmaker.”

Then there are all-expenses-paid trips for lawmakers and potential lawmakers to Tel Aviv, which buys Israel considerable favours from the recipients of such generosity.

Smear campaigns

On the media front, the series exposes how pro-Israel Jewish papers gin up antisemitism hoaxes to malign university students. Then Canary Mission, a hate website founded and funded by the convicted tax fraud Adam Milstein, smears students by putting all available information about them online in a bid to harass them and hamper their career prospects.

Mearsheimer breaks down the two-step modus operandi of the Israel lobby deployed in its smear jobs: “The first is to put out a story that’s very favourable to Israel. But the second step is to do everything possible to minimise the amount of debate there is about Israel and silence the other side as much as possible.”

The documentary sheds light on the use of personal attacks that the lobby group employs to intimidate and harass people it doesn’t like. Bill Mullen, Professor at Purdue University, was targeted this way, as was an unnamed pro-Palestinian Muslim woman who was slandered in the vilest ways to force her into silence.

Talking about the effectiveness of such abominable tactics, Baime of the Israel on Campus Coalition reveals:

“They either shut down or they spend time responding to it [the smears] and investigating it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. So that’s incredibly effective.”

To give a sense of the size of this smear operation, Baime says that the project budget is around $2 million. This was in 2016.

Baime vouches for the incendiary operation’s effectiveness:

“Canary Mission is highly, highly effective to the extent that we monitor the Students for Justice in Palestine and their allies.”

Convicted tax fraud Adam Milstein-funded smear site Canary Mission.

Israeli government’s covert mission in the US

However, the most egregious of the lobby’s actions is its spying operation on American citizens via the Israeli government’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs (MSA). Sima Vaknin-Gil, the then-Director General of the Israeli ministry, which came into existence in 2006 and initially focused its operations on smearing the BDS movement, breaks down the working of the MSA into three parts:

1. Data gathering

2. Working on activist organisations

3. Money trail

Furthermore, she makes a startling admission: the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD) is an Israeli front and a partner in MSA’s mission of spying on Americans. “We have FDD. We have others working on this,” she says.

The FDD registered as a lobbying organisation only in 2019, three years after the filming of the Al Jazeera series.

Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada, who appears in the series, sums up the gravity of such Israeli operations with an analogy: “If you had on tape a senior Russian or Iranian or even Canadian official saying that they were running covert operations to spy on Americans and using an organisation like the Foundation for Defence of Democracies as a front group, I think it would be a bombshell.”

But Israel is no Russia, Iran, or Canada. So everything goes.

Schanzer, the then-senior Vice President at FDD, who focused his “research” on linking the SJP and the BDS movement with armed Palestinian resistance groups, toiled without luck in conjuring up any such link.

He, however, let out one moment of truth in a rather deceitful career:

“Personally, I think the antisemitism as a smear is not what it used to be.”

It is a rare, honest admission from an avowed Zionist that labelling everything under the sun as antisemitic has lost its effectiveness.

When you can’t beat them, slander them

Noah Pollak, the then-Executive Director of the lobby group Emergency Committee for Israel, gives a lesson in the power of repetition, even if it’s a bare-faced lie: “When you talk about BDS, you talk about them as a movement that absolutely endorses violence against civilians a.k.a. terrorism.”

However, the lobby doesn’t limit itself to mere slander campaigns. It exerts considerable control on high-ranking university officials, as Jackie Retig, the then-Director of Academic Affairs at the Israeli Consulate in New York, lets out: “Every university president takes our calls, takes our meetings, works with us because we’re a legitimate government organisation.”

Retig is an American citizen working for the government of Israel to the detriment of her compatriots. “I’m meeting with university presidents, faculty, students. What they are doing is building relationships with local politicians, making sure the politicians know to turn to them when Israel-sensitive things come to the table.”

Declining support for Israel

David Brog of the Maccabee Task Force, which works to combat BDS on American campuses, laments that pro-Palestine sentiment has overtaken support for Israel among millennials. Brog confesses: “When you get to the students and the millennials, it’s a bad situation. And it’s getting to the point where the majority is more favourable towards the Palestinians than the Israelis.”

This sentiment was recently shared by Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who was heard in leaked audio complaining about the declining support for the genocidal state: “But I also wanna point out that we have a major, major, major generational problem. All the polling that I’ve seen — ADL’s polling, ICC’s polling, independent polling — suggests this is not a left or right gap, folks. The issue in the United States’ support for Israel is not left and right; it is young and old.”

“We really have a Tik-Tok problem, a Gen-Z problem,” Greenblatt adds.

“My apartheid”

In a rather puerile move, the lobby has even co-opted black South Africans for their propaganda purposes to run an absurd campaign called “Stop stealing my apartheid.”

Abunimah sums up the repugnant campaign perfectly: “If it wasn’t so sad, it would be comical because the idea of ‘Stop stealing my apartheid’ is that Black South Africans should feel this sense of ownership over apartheid — ‘my apartheid’ — and want to protect their apartheid from Palestinians from stealing the term. It’s just so insulting.”

Through this campaign, the lobby has roped in black South Africans to write articles for American outlets claiming that BDS has distorted their history.

They even got Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, Clarence B. Jones, to write a series of articles in The Huffington Post about how the civil rights icon would have supported Israel had he been alive. Andy David, the then-Israeli Consul General in San Francisco, reveals how he got Jones to write those articles: “He became a very good and personal friend. Because of that relationship, he published three articles in the Huffington Post, explaining why their agenda was hijacked.”

Influencing reporting from Israel

During its ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel has barred foreign journalists from reporting from the besieged enclave — unless they are embedded with the Israeli military, in which case they get guided tours of supposed Palestinian tunnels and IDF-planted arms caches.

It’s not a new development. Everything that comes out of Israel in the form of news has always been not only tightly controlled by the Israelis but dictated by them. In the documentary, Gallagher from TIP explains how this Israeli dictation works: “One of the reasons why Israel is covered disproportionately is the overwhelming majority of journalists covering the Middle East is based in Jerusalem.” He slyly remarks how they get foreign “journalists” to do “journalism” from the Holy Land: “Jerusalem is a place where you know after a 4 o’clock deadline, you can get drunk in a bar and meet beautiful women.”

He also reveals the more sinister aspects of The Israel Project’s work: “TIP is laying the groundwork for a future war with Hizbullah. We are preparing for the worst-case scenario; if it happens, we have to be ready because that war will be won or lost in the court of public opinion, not on the battlefield.”

(With the ever-escalating exchange of fire between Hizbullah and Israel in the ongoing Gaza genocide, Gallagher’s moment of truth appears to be just around the corner.)

All this transpires with lobby-linked operatives building relationships with foreign correspondents who then go on to report the Israeli point of view to their audience. Gallagher: “We have an enormous interest in affecting the people who work on the ground there, and that’s what they do. They build relationships with people who can give them information that they can then feed to journalists who we are building relationships with.”

Here’s one CNN “journalist” cultivated by the lobby:

A CNN “journalist” at work.

David Hazony, the then-editor of lobby-linked Tower magazine and managing director of The Israel Project, reveals how his magazine simply pushes a glut of lurid propaganda to entrench the lobby’s talking points among the public.

They do it through stories with “carefully messaged” headlines. Hazony: “We know that people get their news mostly through the headlines. So, the headlines are very carefully messaged. We don’t have any reporters; we just have three people who churn out carefully crafted headlines with article text that convinces you that the headline is true.”

These are the results of Hazony’s endeavours:

He goes on to make the extraordinary claim that 10-second propaganda videos created by his team and published on social media platforms played an instrumental role in the United States reneging on the Iran nuclear deal.

Moreover, he reveals that the falling attention spans of news consumers have spelled a boom for propagandists like him: “You can send me the greatest article you want about the Iran deal, but I promise you that a 10-second video will get a thousand times as many views.”

“What’s good for Israel is good for everybody”

The Israel lobby is keen to push down its repulsive propaganda that everything that Israelis believe is good for them is, by extension, good for everybody, no matter where in the world they are. Josh Block, the then-CEO and President of TIP, expounds: “We want to articulate the reasons that the notion of a Jewish state is a good thing for us as Americans, and it’s a good thing for Jews and a good thing for Israel and a good thing for the West and a good thing for everybody.”

However, Mearsheimer warned in 2017 that Israel’s ever-tightening grip on American polity doesn’t bode well for anyone involved. “The decades ahead promise abundant trouble for Israel and especially for the Palestinians, and the United States will not be spared either simply because the lobby will be working overtime to protect Israel and preserve the special relationship, which is likely to harm America’s intellectual life as well as its politics.”

In their book Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer and Walt write that, unlike the present, there used to be a realisation in a not-so-distant past of Israel and the US being two separate entities with interests not always 100 percent in alignment. They write: “In the 1980s, however, some more traditional conservatives — sometimes referred to as ‘paleoconservatives’ — claimed that the neoconservatives were more concerned about Israel than the United States. For example, Russell Kirk, the well-known conservative political theorist, maintained that “what really animates the neoconservatives . . . is the preservation of Israel. That lies in back of everything.”

The prevailing pro-Israel discourse in the United States has become so deeply entrenched that Jewish leaders in the country have openly talked about being more concerned about the welfare of Israel than the United States.

Consider the example of Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra convict and a stereotypical establishment ghoul who has held positions in several administrations since Ronald Reagan, irrespective of the party in power, openly flaunting his loyalty to another state. Mearsheimer and Walt write: “Abrams is hardly objective about Israel, having previously written in a 1997 book that ‘there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.’ This is a remarkable comment coming from an individual who holds a critically important position on Middle East policy in the U.S. government.”

Brian Baird, a Congressman from 1999-2011, once recollected: “I had a group once come me — they defined themselves as a pro-Israel group. They came into my office, they sat down, and they said, ‘Congressman, we are so happy to see you. Of course, our first priority today is Israel.’ And I said, let’s pause for a second; if your first priority today is Israel, then you should be in the Knesset. My first priority is the United States of America.”

Schrodinger’s lobby

There’s a thought experiment in quantum physics known as Schrodinger’s cat. Here’s a simplified version of the experiment: If you put a cat in a closed box with a fistful of edible poison and no way to look inside the box, the cat can be considered simultaneously dead and alive since its fate would be linked to its consumption of the poison. We can’t know if the cat consumed the poison until the box is opened.

Israeli lobby displays characteristics of Schrodinger’s cat. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the lobby claims to exert no undue influence in American politics, policymaking, and public discourse while simultaneously silencing anyone who raises the issue of its undue influence.

As if to prove the point of the documentary series, the Israeli lobby put such pressure on the Qatari government that it prevented Al Jazeera — which it funds — from releasing The Lobby - US. Moreover, the Zionist Organisation of America took credit for blocking its release following “‘numerous, exhaustive, and round​-​the​-​clock meetings’ between its president, Morton Klein, Qatar’s emir, and other top Doha officials.” (Eventually, The Electronic Intifada got a hold of the series and released it on its YouTube channel. An Arab and a French media channel also released the documentary in their respective languages around the same time as The Electronic Intifada.)

Mearsheimer and Walt had a similar difficulty in getting their work on the Israel lobby published. The Atlantic Monthly initially commissioned an article on the subject, but the publisher backed out after the duo submitted the article. In the preface of their book, the authors write: [T]he editor informed us that the Atlantic had decided not to run the piece and that he was not interested in our attempting to revise it.” Ultimately, it came out in the London Review of Books in 2006 and eventually as a book a year later.

The reactions to the book from the usual suspects were unsurprising and fierce. Alan Dershowitz wasted 40 pages in critiquing the book before reverting to the mean and calling it “antisemitic,” while the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called the book “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.” It is all par for the course for Israeli attack dogs in the United States.

The Israelis get all the American money, equipment, and support at the UN but still hold their largest benefactors in nothing but contempt. Here’s Netanyahu in a tape from 2001 boasting about killing the Oslo peace process and his literal control over American administration:

“I know what America is. America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction. They won’t get their way.”

It’s the same Netanyahu who once told an audience in Tel Aviv that 9/11 attacks on the United States were a good thing for Israel.

At a press briefing last December, State Department Spokesperson John Kirby wore an Israeli military dog tag given to him by the family of one of the prisoners of war in the custody of Palestinian resistance fighters. The Israeli embassy in the US applauded Kirby’s fashion statement.

While it may be considered crude, Kirby in an Israeli military dog tag is a perfect encapsulation of the Israel-US relationship: the analogy of the US administration barking at Israel’s command in the ongoing Gaza genocide isn’t off the mark.

More worryingly, that command has become so deeply ingrained that the American readiness to follow the Israeli lead — as evidenced by the American bombing of Yemen, putting troops in danger across the Middle East, and sending weapons to Israel without Congressional approval to enable its genocide in Palestine — has become Pavlovian.

The concluding part of this two-part series covers the Israel lobby’s influence in the UK. Read it here.

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Israel needs a humanitarian intervention