What does the Israel Lobby actually do?
Rather than driving U.S. foreign policy, the pro-Israel movement helps reinforce the establishment consensus for keeping an empire in the Middle East.

The “Israel Lobby” is on the warpath. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is spending $14.5 million to unseat Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.) in his primary election, more than they’ve ever spent on a campaign. And it makes sense why. In Bowman’s district, like in other New York suburbs, the politics of Israel and Palestine are a stand-in for broader ethnic and class tensions that leave Bowman at a disadvantage.
Naturally, Bowman has made fighting AIPAC’s influence a large part of his campaign pitch, and just as predictably, he has been accused of harboring an antisemitic obsession. So what is the Israel Lobby, exactly? How much power do AIPAC and its allies really have? Where does their money come from, and where is it spent?
In January 2023, I wrote a review of a book on U.S.-Israeli relations that addressed these questions. The book was written by a pro-Israel journalist who didn’t have any obvious material incentive to support Israel — in other words, a true believer — as a case for why the Israel Lobby doesn’t matter. Both what he got right and what he got wrong was pretty illuminating.
My review wasn’t published quickly enough, and since most newspapers will only publish a review of a book that came out in the past year, I set it aside. But I didn’t forget about it; for the past year or so, it has been something like a theoretical framework guiding my journalism on the topic, even if I don’t agree with every word I wrote back then. So I am sharing it here with you, almost exactly as it was written in January last year, with a few minor grammatical corrections:
Joe Biden said years ago that “were there no Israel, America would have to invent one.”
Biden was speaking about why U.S. aid to Israel is worth the cost, but he accidentally expressed a deeper truth about American political culture. Israel is a place where American elites and large parts of the public can project all of their feelings about liberalism, conservatism, security, power, Islam, the Bible, Jewish-Christian relations, World War II, imperialism, the frontier, and more.
Right-wing columnist Walter Russell Mead agrees. His recent book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, traces the role of Israel and Zionism in American political culture through the years. “[W]hile the object of these policy debates is U.S.-Israel relations, the energy driving this activism comes from Americans’ deepest beliefs about themselves and their identity,” he writes.
To Mead, this is a good thing, because he believes that Americans should continue to want a global empire with a Middle Eastern focus, both for their own moral and material well-being, and for the sake of the region’s peoples.
He dismisses the influence of the “Israel Lobby” on U.S. foreign policy. Mead implies that “Israel Lobby” critics have an unduly “Jewcentric” view of history, and compares them to 19th century astronomers searching for the non-existent planet Vulcan. Pro-Israel groups mostly get what they ask for, Mead argues, because the American people already want the same things.
But if these lobbyists are not affecting the course of U.S. policy, then what are they doing?
A lot of money is spent organizing pro-Israel conferences, flying U.S. officials to Israel, commissioning pro-Israel policy papers, and of course campaigning for pro-Israel politicians. It is hard to understand why serious businesspeople would plow over $100 million per year into organizations that do not change anything, or why serious politicians would seek their support.
While the pro-Israel movement does not drive U.S. politics, it serves an important purpose for the American establishment. Because the U.S.-Israel relationship is a central symbol in American political culture, pro-Israel groups police the boundaries of debate around U.S. policy towards the Middle East and the Muslim world as a whole.
To paraphrase Biden: if the Israel Lobby didn’t exist, Washington would have to invent one.
Mead is correct that these groups have influence because the American system wants them to. Had American policymakers decided that Palestinians are a symbol of the liberal world order, and that U.S. policy must ensure the security of Palestine, then pro-Israel activists would find a much less receptive audience, or perhaps even legal barriers to their work.
After all, pro-Beijing activists have a lot of U.S. dollars to spend, but the U.S. president is not going to be speaking at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research or Lyndon LaRouche’s think tank any time soon.
American elites have decided that they want to be “pro-Israel” in general — and that Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies — so pro-Israel institutions get to define what that means. Mead calls pro-Israel groups “instruments through which a pro-Israel majority enacts its preferences into policy and law.”
However, the pro-Israel movement is not a simple vessel for the popular will. As Mead acknowledges, its role gives the movement the ability to reward politicians who agree with it and punish those who disagree. In turn, that means the power to set the terms of broader national security debates.
The American police delegations to Israel are a good example of how this dynamic works in practice. Pro-Israel groups offer up courses in Israeli counterterrorism tactics and trips to meet with Israeli security officials. Hundreds of American law enforcement officers have taken up the offer.
No one is forcing these classes on U.S. cops; the decision to treat domestic policing like counter-insurgency warfare was a purely American one. The role of pro-Israel groups is to direct those cops’ attention to the Israeli model, and give them direct personal experience with it.
In return, those pro-Israel groups get to influence how American law enforcement sees the threat posed by Muslim militants, and to portray Israel as the central ally countering that threat. Whatever preexisting reasons American police have for attending these classes, it matters that they are going to Israel — and not India, the Philippines, or Kosovo.
Critics of the “Israel Lobby” often misunderstand the nature of the relationship. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt famously argued in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy that pro-Israel advocacy was a “necessary but not sufficient” factor behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and “absent the lobby’s influence, there almost certainly would not have been a war.”
Mearsheimer and Walt are correct in pointing out that pro-Israel advocates were among the loudest voices for war. But the war was not a case of Israel pushing an ill-advised plan on a naive U.S. leadership. The Bush administration wanted to crush Iraq, so it deputized the pro-Israel movement as its public relations arm.
Neoconservatives do not necessarily want to bomb the Middle East because they love Israel so much; they love Israel because it is a reason to bomb the Middle East.
The aftermath of the Iraq War created a large domestic constituency to stop U.S. intervention in the Middle East’s conflicts. When the Obama administration pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq and opened negotiations with Iran, elements of the Republican and Democratic establishments invoked the need to protect Israel from the Iranian menace.
In fact, pro-Israel rhetoric has replaced other justifications for intervening in the Middle East by now. “Radical Islamic terror,” the central fear of American politics as late as 2016, has quietly faded from political relevance. Fighting for oil has become a toxic idea, and the global energy market no longer relies so much on American boots in Kuwait anyway.
Upholding the Israeli status quo still means committing to the same investments across the Middle East: managing Palestinian discontent, holding Iran at bay, bringing friendly Arab dictators on board, and suppressing any unruly social movements that might object to this whole arrangement.
Mearsheimer and Walt correctly argue that pro-Israel policies have not benefited the American people, and often get in the way of other U.S. goals. Rather than addressing Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments head-on, Meed hems, haws, and philosophizes about what the “national interest” really means. In fact, Mead does not mention The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy at all, instead citing a litany of antisemitic conspiracy theories and politicians’ crude gaffes as representatives of the opposing side.
It is correct to say that neither have pro-Israel policies improved Americans’ general well-being, nor were they not foisted on Washington by pro-Israel activists. The U.S. establishment has its own reasons to stay involved in Middle Eastern conflicts. A lot of money flows between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi in the form of defense contracts and tech investments — money that benefits key congressional districts and policymakers.
Pro-Israel activists sometimes argue that U.S. military aid is a taxpayer subsidy to American weapons manufacturers rather than a giveaway to the Israeli people. Well, exactly.
Policymakers may also find it personally hard to let go of a region they have staked their honor and professional prospects on.
British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and Columbia professor Edward Saïd meant it philosophically when they wrote that “the East is a career.” In this case, it’s a lot more literal. The military administration in Iraq was the “job opportunity of a lifetime” for a generation of fresh-faced political staffers, many of whom now hold high positions.
Given how strongly Israel is identified with establishment policy, it has become an important symbol in debates between the Democratic establishment and the party’s left wing. A politician criticizing U.S. aid to Israel is a fairly reliable indicator that she holds also unorthodox views on other issues, so the pro-Israel movement has been again deputized to crush left-wing insurgents.
Of course, Israel and its supporters see a benefit to playing along. Netanyahu relishes the role of bad cop, and genuinely supports more aggressive U.S. military action. Pro-Israel lobbyists like AIPAC want a chance to impress donors and strike fear into their enemies. Most importantly, playing a role in American domestic debates boosts Israel’s diplomatic standing. If other countries believe that the road to Washington runs through Jerusalem, then that access becomes a valuable bargaining chip.
So far, the bet has paid off. Republicans seem to have polarized in a pro-Israel direction, while Democrats’ internal conflict has left the party’s most important leaders in the pro-Israel camp. However, identifying so loudly with establishment politics may backfire. Polling suggests that younger Americans’ sympathy for Israel, including in traditionally pro-Israel sectors like the evangelical churches, is drying up faster than many imagined.
At the end of the day, Israel’s rhetorical role is the same as its real-life role. Israel serves as the most favored U.S. client state in the Middle East, and it uses this position to extract significant concessions for itself — but only because Washington lets it.