The Israel Lobby’s Changing Fortunes
The American Conservative · R · trust 39/100
A follow-up to Mearsheimer and Walt shows a project in flux.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Israel’s Lobby , by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. Atria/One Signal. 304 pages
A natural question to ask about Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s Israel’s Lobby is how it differs from the magisterial work of similar name published by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt nearly 20 years ago. Certainly its entry into the American debate is less dramatic: Mearsheimer and Walt’s work had behind it the force of taboo-breaking, taking on a subject which had been more whispered about than debated for two generations. Despite a massive campaign to denigrate their work by the lobby’s many allies in the mainstream media (I believe The American Conservative was the only American print publication to give it a positive review), Mearsheimer and Walt’s book became not only a best-seller but a genuine international publishing sensation.
Though it wasn’t obvious at the time, Mearsheimer and Walt’s book appeared at a moment when there was still a clear open path towards a moderate future, sanctioned by a strong international consensus. This was true both for the American-Israeli relationship (they urged that America treat Israel like a normal country, while maintaining a moral commitment to defend it) and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (they favored a two-state solution). The Iraq War, pushed relentlessly by Benjamin Netanhayu and other Israeli officials, and in great part the project of small group of passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives in American journalism and government, was already in the rearview mirror. The two authors cheered the birth of new liberal Zionist institutions like J Street, created to encourage United States support for a more moderate Israel at peace with its neighbors.
Clifton and Lustick’s impressive follow-up does not, to say the least, arrive at such a propitious time. Lustick is an accomplished Ivy-League political scientist who has produced important work on how ethnically driven conflicts can be managed or resolved. Clifton is a Quincy Institute co-founder and journalist who belongs to the cohort of American millennials who grew up when it was no longer outlandish to question the moral correctness of Zionism. Their book arrives as an erratic American president has started, at Israel’s behest, a war against the largest and most highly educated country in the Mideast, and oscillates between uttering threats of genocide and claims that the war is already won. On the home front it has become almost shockingly commonplace for entertainers and college students alike to shout slogans that call implicitly or explicitly for the destruction of Israel, something unimaginable 20 years ago. Meanwhile Israel, in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, has conducted a brutal campaign against Gaza’s defenseless civilians that is often described as a genocide and is indisputably a project of ethnic cleansing. Israel’s lobby today is both similar and quite different from the one Walt and Mearsheimer described. Is it stronger or weaker? Some of both certainly, and while it may be weaker overall, it is clearly dangerous the way all wounded creatures are.
Of the many elements which have changed since 2007, three stand out. The main institutions of the lobby, always wealthy relative to their opponents and competitors, are far richer. Israel itself has changed. Its commitment to peace with the Palestinians, if in the past more advertised than actual, has been completely submerged; no Israeli leader of consequence even pretends to want a settlement with the people who inhabit the land Israel now controls, and the country’s policy of seeking outright military domination of its entire region, though challenged by many Israeli former officials and scholars, faces no substantial political opposition. And finally, in a point emphasized by Clifton and Lustick, its lobby has more or less abandoned efforts to explain or justify Israeli policies, to convince Americans of their necessity and appropriateness. Instead increasingly Israel’s supporters in the United States seek to conflate any opposition to Israel and American support for it with antisemitism.
That is to say, to challenge seriously Washington’s special relationship with Israel is presented as a major moral failing, the kind of mark which would place one beyond the pale of respectable discourse. And while these three developments make Israel as influential as ever in Washington and particularly within the Trump administration, its actual popularity among voters, particularly among Democrats and the young of both parties, has sunk like a stone.
In a key section, the authors document how in the last generation America has seen the greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich. The percentage share of national wealth held by the top 0.1 percent rose by two-thirds. Meanwhile, two court decisions from 2010 have made it much easier for billionaires to buy national policies to their liking.
As pro-Israel think tank and advocacy money rose, so did Israel-related campaign and advocacy group contributions. When Citizens United v . Federal Election Commission was decided in 2010, no one anticipated it would weigh critically on American Mideast policy. The decision struck down limitations on campaign spending by unions and corporations, and in conjunction with the consequences of the SpeechNow.org v . FEC decision, opened the gates for increased spending by the super rich. Individual campaign spending limitations, $1,000 until 2003, later raised to roughly $3,000, suddenly became almost irrelevant as ultra wealthy individual donors began to dispense virtually unlimited funds to support or oppose candidates through so-called superPACs.
In principle this enhanced capacity of billionaires to buy policies of their choosing was available to anyone; in practice those passionate about supporting Israel used it the…
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