It’s hard to hear about the November elections without the role of PACs and big-money donors coming into the conversation. Most voters are aware of the power and sway of the National Rifle Association, Pharma, Tech, and Wall Street. Now, for the rest of the populace, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has never been so prominent a factor.

For those who have watched their actions vigilantly, it was hard to miss their efforts to defeat Rep. Andy Levin, who had served as the Congressman from Detroit, Michigan. A Jew who self-identified as a Zionist, AIPAC wanted Levin out of office because they were not happy with his criticisms of the Israeli government.

AIPAC has gained a reputation for specifically working to defeat progressive candidates, often from minority backgrounds, who have called out Israel on its conduct in Gaza. Most recently, they spent $32 million to defeat Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary.

The tide appears to be shifting, and the new book, Israel’s Lobby: America In the Grip of a Foreign Power by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick, finds itself propitiously placed as diverse arguments about Israel and dark dollars in politics swirl around. In 2007, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt wrote The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Authors Clifton and Lustick acknowledge their debt to that work. Two decades later, they have a plethora of additional material to buttress their premises.

In the “Introduction” to the book, the authors devote several paragraphs to clarifying that “the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans do not prioritize Israel’s well-being or its interests at a meaningful level in determining their voting decisions.” They note that Israel “ranked ninth out of eleven issues of importance for Jewish voters in the 2024 election.”

Clifton and Lustick additionally underscore that the term “Israel’s Lobby” covers a wide range of entities that include Christian Evangelical organizations, political neo-conservatives, as well as Jewish or Israeli-American megadonors. All are adding muscle to elevate the perceived needs of Israel over the intrinsic priorities of the United States.

The authors realize they are on “sensitive” ground that puts them squarely in the middle of the most inflammatory issues of the day as they reference “antisemitism, the influence of Jewish and Israeli-American political donors, and the role of a country created in the aftermath of the Holocaust.”

The tone is set with a story about the actions of a couple “at the top of the political donor class,” Sheldon (now deceased) and Miriam Adelson. After three decades of Israel calling upon American Presidents to grant “clemency” to the domestic spy Jonathan Pollard (who stole top-secret American intelligence for Israel, compromising American national security), the Adelsons commandeered Trump as the vehicle to fulfill that request. (There is extensive documentation for each chapter. The damage assessment report from 1987, since declassified, is included.)

Pollard was spirited back to Israel (and met by Benjamin Netanyahu at the airport) in a private jet provided by the couple. Miriam gets plenty of coverage throughout the book with her role as a major player on the political scene ($100 million to a PAC geared toward Trump, with a sidebar of $37 million to Republican down-ballot candidates in 2024). Her overwhelming monetary support of Israel’s agenda will be part of the authors’ proof of the leverage of their money to “extract unconditional aid, coordination, and support at a scale and for a duration beyond anything a great power has ever done for a foreign country.”

Clifton and Lustick give plenty of stats on the aid Israel has received from the American government, while also questioning if the influx of financial support has fueled “reckless Israeli policies” in opposition to American “interests in a stable Middle East.” (Think Israeli military engagements in Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran.) Yet, as the authors point out, since October 2025, “41 percent of all Americans sought a reduction in military aid to Israel.”

And this is just in the opening pages….

Divided into six chapters, Clifton and Lustick take on individual questions comprising what they see as the key elements of this toxic stew. They start with a primer that goes back to George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, which cautioned about the nefarious consequences of American “passionate attachments toward foreign countries.” It was about “avoiding foreign entanglements” during that historical period when individual “elites” were predisposed to “revolutionary France.”

From there, the text delves into the origins of AIPAC (originally the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs). The authors state the evolution emanated from an effort to shield Israel from public reproach in response to the actions of “bloody reprisal raids” that were carried out against Palestinian villages in the 1950s. By the 1960s, AIPAC had become a recognizable force within the “pro-Israel community.”

AIPAC released its 2025 membership numbers as 5 million. Clifton and Lustick have pegged its primary influence to what they call the “AIPAC litmus test.” They use the example of what they call the “Percy factor.” It was the defeat of Republican Senator Charles Percy, who was unseated in 1984 in response to his vote to sell “an advanced weapon system” to Saudi Arabia. For AIPAC, the bottom line on a candidate boils down to “whether they are loyal to AIPAC preferences on Israel.”

There is the narrative recounting how, in 1992, the President of AIPAC, David Steiner, was secretly recorded in a conversation that later was shared with the Washington Times. It encapsulated his beliefs (and others about the roots of their advocacy): “If we had had AIPAC in the ‘30s and ‘40s we would have saved millions of Jews. We would have had political power. But Jews were afraid to open their mouths.”

Elected officials get canceled for refusing to go along with the AIPAC memo. Democrat Rep. Jim Moran experienced this when he would not agree to a supplemental aid package for Israel. In an interview, he was quoted as saying, “If you cross AIPAC, AIPAC is unforgiving and will destroy you politically.”

Unfortunately, AIPAC is only part of the landscape. This story couldn’t be told or contextualized without recognition of the disastrous state of affairs brought about in America by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling. It opened the door to “donors” with bottomless deep pockets and a host of interests to match. These uber-monied individuals were ready to spend their billions to ensure their specific agendas were enacted via what Clifton and Lustick identify as the “American finance economy.”

The authors present a path of Israel’s role in the American story, beginning with the post-World War 2 scenario. In the chapter titled “Israel and America in a Messy World,” they opine that if decisions made by various presidents could have functioned without the support of partisans to Israel’s cause, “US policies in the Middle East would have been very different.” They offer the dichotomy between “domestic political pressures and foreign policy priorities.”

They commence with Truman’s 1948 decision to grant state recognition to Israel before it was “officially established.” With Palestine in a civil war and Britain exiting, Truman looked to advice from key advisors. Clifford Clark is on the domestic policy front. He wanted to ensure a second term for Truman, and saw that being guaranteed by the American Jewish vote. George C. Marshall was focused on foreign policy, and found the comingling of national politics with national security extremely disturbing and impossible to justify.

Clifton and Lustick then explore the backstory of presidential interactions with different Israeli governments, while referencing the influence on “American civil society.” They speak of the “Overton window” on engaging in parsing the policies of Israel, including issues not just relegated to financial funding of the Israeli state agenda, but topics covering the discussion of Palestinian Human Rights, the American-Israeli “special relationship,” Israel’s claim to be a Jewish and democratic state, BDS, and the status of Jerusalem.

There are plenty of juicy anecdotes to balance out the in-the-weeds geopolitical material. Presidents Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush make appearances. Henry Kissinger (who was Jewish), Ford’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, is quoted as calling the Israelis a series of very unflattering adjectives. Moshe Dayan shows up to inform Carter that if he doesn’t go along with the Israelis on their approach to reconvening the Geneva Conference proposal, he will release an announcement that “the administration had reneged on its commitments to Israel.” This was designed to threaten outreach to American Jewish voters, essentially using them as pawns in the Israeli agenda.

While deeply angered by these actions by Israeli officials, I also wondered how things might have been different if American presidents had offered a flat “No” to Israeli demands — even if it meant they weren’t re-elected.

Clifton and Lustick move next to the degradation of what has been considered Israeli democracy. They qualify Israel as becoming “a country whose behavior pushed it toward a pariah state.” Has Israel become a “crazy state”? With Israeli public opinion moving dangerously to the far right, it is consumed by what the authors define as “expansive goals, often pursued by sabotage, military actions, assassinations, and land expansions.”

Reactions to October 7 unleashed an unprecedented level of violence sanctioned by Netanyahu. In September 2025, he called on Israelis to gird themselves for international isolation, while viewing themselves as a “21^st Century Sparta.”

Palestinian property destruction, imprisonments, and shifting rules of engagement (integrated with AI intelligence systems) are part of the documented Israeli government program. Yet, 74 percent of the Israeli public continues to believe the reason their nation is being criticized and ostracized “stems from antisemitism.”

Did the support of the United States through diplomatic, military, and economic support help push Israel to the edge of the cliff? Clifton and Lustic write that the Israel Lobby’s “clout distorted US Middle East policy in ways that have helped radicalize Israeli politics and extremized its leadership, thereby acting as a driver of Israeli craziness and the global isolations associated with it.”

President Obama’s willingness to have “daylight” between the United States and Israel was not appreciated by numerous groups supporting Israeli strategies. Neither were Obama’s efforts to strengthen national security through diplomacy. The JCPOA had to weather sixty days of review before Congress voted on the plan. The book states that an “AIPAC-controlled advocacy group” spent over $27 million to mount a campaign against its passage. My Congressman, Rep. Eliot Engel, voted against it. Although Clifton and Lustic define the passage of the JCPOA as “a significant loss,” they also point to it as paving the way to the rise of the “megadonor.”

As the daily news (especially in New York City where I live) is consumed with back-and-forth arguments about who said what, where it is on the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or anti-Jewish Richter scale, the chapter on “The Antisemitism Witch Hunt” hit home. It discusses at length the strategy of how supporters of Israeli policy do not base their responses to criticisms about Israel via facts on the ground. Rather, they tar almost all admonishment with the antisemitism label. Led by groups like the Canary Mission (the topic of a New York Times piece), the theory is to “Attack the messenger, not the message.”

The weaponization of antisemitism, particularly on college campuses, was played out in front of American television audiences. The pages outlining how this transpired are intense and upsetting. The revisiting of the opportunism of Speaker Mike Johnson, then-Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, and others was nauseating. Ironically, many of the students who were demonstrating against the war in Gaza were Jewish. Just recently, a whistleblower civil rights lawyer from the Justice Department “accused [Trump] administration officials of using campus antisemitism as a pretext to cut federal grants” from elite universities.

Simultaneously, top-monied contributors to these universities who actively support the Israeli game plan withdrew major contributions from schools they had previously generously supported. As a result, both important medical and scientific grants were cut.

With McCarthy Era tactics in the not-so-distant rear-view mirror (a time when Jews were prominently in the mix of those accused of Communist ties), banning Palestinian organizations, anti-Occupation groups, and the withdrawal of student visas should be of major concern to all Americans. By 2025, the State Department had rescinded 6,000 student visas. Canary Mission popped up again, both for their listings of students and professors, but also because of the alleged use by ICE of their website to “identify targets for deportation.” Media censorship around terms used to cover the war in Gaza, law firm hiring impacts, and the doxing of critics of Israel round out the picture of censorship and attacks on Freedom of Speech.

Unfortunately, Jewish legacy organizations are not going to be of help. Clifton and Lustick call them out for adding to American Jewish fears about antisemitism with their “denunciations of leftist radicals, neo-Marxists, and Communists”…while underplaying “the substantially more potent threat of antisemitism on the far right of the political spectrum.” In their conclusion, “Desperation, Danger, and Hope”, Clifton and Lustick again foreground that in the United States, “there really are antisemites.”

How readers digest the information in this book will depend on the individual. We are at a time when extreme language by all parties keeps the pot boiling. Jewish Progressive leaders, including Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Dov Waxman, have addressed concerns about the use of verbiage when taking on AIPAC and other organizations.

Regardless, the information in Israel’s Lobby cannot be dismissed. Perhaps the blurb by Avraham Burg, political activist and former Speaker of the Knesset, says it best:

“As an Israeli and as a Jew, I will say what Israel’s Lobby cannot afford to hear: it does not serve America, and it does not serve Israel. It serves its own power, at everyone’s expense…Read it, wake up, and act.”