Israel's Lobby: How a foreign policy lobby shapes US politics and undermines American interests
Glenn Diesen interviews authors Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick about their book on Israel's lobby and its influence on US foreign policy.
Summary
Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick, authors of Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, join Glenn Diesen to examine how the Israel lobby has shaped — and often distorted — US foreign policy. Lustick explains that the lobby's unusual power stems from the fact that foreign policy is a low-salience issue for most American voters, meaning politicians face punishment for defying the lobby but gain little reward from constituents for resisting it — a dynamic George Washington explicitly anticipated in his farewell address. Clifton traces how Citizens United opened the campaign finance floodgates, allowing a small group of extremely wealthy, right-wing donors to effectively replace the broad grassroots support the lobby once enjoyed.
A central analytical chapter of the book frames Israel as a 'crazy state' — using the definition coined by Israeli public policy scholar Yehezkel Dror, who originally applied the term to Arab states and the PLO, and which the authors argue now fits Israel more than any other country. As Israel has shifted dramatically to the right, they argue, the lobby has abandoned defending Israeli policies in favour of suppressing debate — including through deportations of green card holders and the withholding of federal funds from universities.
The authors also highlight a significant and underreported development: cracks in evangelical Christian support for Israel, with the Israeli government now spending significant sums on FARA-registered domestic publicity campaigns targeting evangelical voters — a response the authors describe as reflecting genuine panic about eroding support in a constituency the lobby had long counted on.
Both authors contend that the two-state solution is no longer viable, and that the honest framing of the current situation is silent apartheid, with the only path forward being a long-term process toward equal democratic rights for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — a better problem to have, they argue, than sustaining the current regime.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: A lobby like no other
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick to discuss their excellent new book, Israel's Lobby. For those who have not bought it yet, now is a good time — I've left a link in the description. Thank you both for coming on. This is quite an important book, and also quite relevant. The way I see it, the era of liberal hegemony is over, and there seems to be a growing push now in the United States to adjust to new realities by ending the forever wars. But seemingly the Israel lobby is a key restraint — a limitation on the ability to make these changes. The Trump administration, as we know, expressed the ambition of ending the forever wars before launching this disastrous war on Iran, and there seems to be a very wide consensus that Israel pushed the US towards it. We don't really need much consensus — the evidence is already there. And we see many more critical voices in terms of how Israel is influencing US policies. What I find fascinating about your book is that you follow the money and find out how essentially the US ended up pursuing policies that undermine its own interests.
I'm not sure where's a good place to start, but I'm thinking — well, you argue that Israel's lobby is like no other. What makes it different from other lobbies, because the US has many powerful lobbies?
Eli Clifton: I want to let Ian answer this, but I want to quickly get in there with what you said before the question, which was about how this seems to go against what the Trump administration had said they wanted to do. Something that we point out in the book, and that I think is meaningful, is that in our media discussion, in our political discourse, we tend to focus on Trump a great deal. But it is noticeable to look at the previous presidents — and I mean recent presidents — who have stated, all of them in various forms, that they wanted to pivot away from the Middle East. From Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump again, they've all indicated this: that they want to focus, in varying manners and forms, on managing a rising China and shifting focus to the Pacific. And all of them have said that the only way that can happen is with a pivot away from the Middle East. And every single one of them has been thwarted in that effort. Ian, do you want to take it from there?
Ian Lustick: Sure. Let's look at it in a couple of ways. What's so unusual about this lobby? I think we titled the chapter "A Lobby Like No Other." Lobbies are very common, as you noted, in the United States. The whole country was based on a constitution which imagined that every interest in the country would mobilise on behalf of its own very particular desires. Every faction would therefore counterbalance the influence of the other faction opposed to it, and that would give a certain equilibrium to American politics.
What stands out about the Israel lobby — what makes it so unusual — is, number one, it's a foreign policy lobby, and very few foreign policy lobbies have enough interest to Americans to matter very much in American politics. The Israel lobby is one of the only foreign policy lobbies to actually matter, and matter a very great deal. In fact, it matters more because most people don't care about foreign policy. So if a congressman or a president is pressured by the Israel lobby to do something in foreign policy that they otherwise wouldn't want to do, they do it because their constituents won't reward them for standing up to the Israel lobby. Traditionally, most constituents just don't care, but they know they're going to get punished severely by the Israel lobby if they don't toe the line. And that has been why the lobby has been so successful.
This, we know, was anticipated by President George Washington in his farewell address, when he warned that although it was fine for domestic lobbies to contend in the arena of American politics, partisanship should really stop at the water's edge. Because if there was — and I'm quoting George Washington — "a passionate attachment between one faction in America and a foreign country," that would distort all of American foreign policy, because there would be no countervailing power standing against it domestically, and the politicians would cave to its influence. He has been proven tragically correct, although perhaps now things are changing a bit.
The evolution of the Israel lobby's power
Glenn Diesen: Well, that thought was interesting as well — what Eli said earlier, that this didn't start with Trump. Indeed, it was Obama who first announced this pivot to Asia. But I was wondering if you can take us through the evolution of Israel's lobby. It's quite surprising, given that it's a fairly small country, how it became so powerful in the United States. If you would look only at national interest, one could argue that from 1967 it looked like a powerful bridge into the Middle East. But these days, of course, it's seen more and more as undermining US interests. I was just wondering how this evolution took place.
Ian Lustick: Well, this started in the 1950s with an operation by the Israeli Foreign Ministry to gain certain influence in the United States and counterbalance anti-Zionist sentiments that existed in the State Department under the Eisenhower administration — sentiments that anticipated that an ideologically committed Jewish state with revanchist, irredentist ambitions would destabilise the region and interfere with American ambitions to counter Soviet influence. So it goes back to the early 1950s.
What happened was that supporters of Israel, who were also very active in support of the Zionist movement before the creation of the state, organised themselves with Israeli help and became what we now know as the Israel lobby, with its core as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — though it went by a different name early on. And they took full advantage of the point I was making earlier, knowing that most Americans don't care. They became extremely well organised. They could go to politicians from Montana or Kansas or North Dakota and say, "Look, we want you to support what we are saying about the Middle East, even though the president may not like it. And if you do support it, we will support you. But if you don't support us, we will organise a primary against you, and it will only take a little money in your district. Nobody cares in your district or in your state about this issue. So if you defy us, you're not going to gain anything. And if you acquiesce, you're going to win. You're going to benefit."
Now, that resulted — if you look at American foreign policy over the global sector — in two issues in which traditionally American foreign policy has been really weird: three standard deviations from the international mean. One of them is Israel. The other one is Cuba. The United States and Israel vote every October to continue the embargo and blockade of Cuba. The rest of the world says no. What accounts for the fact that these two issues — Cuba and Israel — have American foreign policies that are so strange? What accounts for those two issues is that those are the two issues where there are foreign policy lobbies that really count domestically. And domestic politics is what counts for American presidents and for American congressmen.
So it's dedication, it's money, it's alliances within the Jewish community and outside the Jewish community with Christian evangelicals, and it's the structure of American politics thoroughly exploited — that explains the rise and consolidation of the power of the Israel lobby.
Eli Clifton: Now, there's something interesting here, which is that the lobby's strength and its ability to exert influence — certainly for the first several decades of its existence — relied on foreign policy being a low-salience issue, and on at least nominally pro-Israel sentiments within the electorate. That gave it a lot of leeway in terms of what it could ask for from politicians. As Ian said, there was a notion that it was sort of cost-free if you went along with the lobby.
But around 2000, with the death of the Oslo Accords and heading into the global war on terror, you start to see a pretty steady but slow decline in pro-Israel sentiment within the electorate in the United States. Not enough to really swing elections, not enough to make it a high enough salience issue that it's swinging votes, but you start to see a trend emerge.
And I think something pretty interesting happens: with 2010 and the Citizens United and Speech Now court decisions that opened the floodgates into our campaign finance system, it allowed a small group of people — donors — to have a great deal of influence within our political system that they had previously been denied in some ways. And through that mechanism, you see the lobby take on a new life at the top of the campaign finance ecosystem, driven by an increasingly small group of people with really rightward views about Israel — very much in line with the Likud governments in Israel — and in a sense a more radical set of views being expressed both in Israel and via the lobby in the United States. That could only be possible when they're able to effectively have a stranglehold on the campaign finance of elections and of members of Congress, and again that threat of a primary being staged against them that they might not be able to afford to counter.
American policymakers subordinating US interests to Israel
Glenn Diesen: Well, I guess another unique aspect of the Israel lobby is that, as you argue, it's not just that it's influencing US policy, but American policymakers themselves, over and over again, subordinate US interests to those of Israel. I was wondering — do you have any examples of this, and how has it increased?
Eli Clifton: I think the most recent one is a pretty good place to start, with the Iran war. You have Marco Rubio coming out there and saying — within the first 36 hours of the war — that the reason the United States chose to join Israel in this is that they concluded the Israelis were going to start attacking Iran again, and that in doing so, the Iranians were inherently going to be attacking American targets in the region. So the United States had no choice but to go along with this.
Now, what's really missing from that is any consideration that the United States might have been able to tell the Israelis, "Don't do it" — if for no other reason than our own interests, which is that we didn't want to be dragged into this war. This is the thing that Donald Trump said he wanted to avoid. But instead, you have the Secretary of State out there saying pretty explicitly that the Israelis twisted their arm. And you watch the lobby light up in the first 24 hours of that conflict — you see AIPAC and other groups enthusiastically celebrating the start of that war. So again, a war that the Secretary of State said was effectively forced upon this administration.
Ian Lustick: And of course there are many examples. We go into them in some detail in the book — from the Ford administration, from the Truman administration, from the Carter administration, from President Obama, and as we've just mentioned, President Trump — where a president has an idea, often about how to achieve peace between Israel and the Arabs, usually through some kind of comprehensive settlement that the United States and the Soviet Union will agree on. And then the Israel lobby mobilises powerfully, and the domestic affairs adviser for the president points out that he is very likely to lose Congress or lose his own election or re-election bid if he gives in on this issue. And repeatedly we document how presidents have said, "I can't do what I want," promising the Arabs that next time, after they're re-elected, they will be able to go forward with this plan. And it's happened over and over again.
This is a systematic example of how American interests — as defined by what a president and his top foreign policy and national security advisers believe is in the national interest — how those policies are thwarted, are shifted, are vetoed, by the Israel lobby. What we do in the book that goes a little bit beyond that is focus not only on how American interests abroad are compromised, but now how and why the lobby's influence is compromising American freedoms at home.
How Israel's rightward shift has transformed the lobby
Glenn Diesen: How has the change in Israel impacted the Israel lobby? Because the Israel we saw in the '70s and '60s is a very different Israel than what we see today — more right-wing nationalist, religious, and we can put extremist in there as well. Has this impacted the lobby in any way?
Ian Lustick: Tremendously. As Eli noted, there's been a diffuse sentiment in the United States that Israel is a good thing — a heroic response of Jews to the Holocaust. There's a kind of cultural affinity between Christian America thinking of itself as a kind of chosen, exceptional people and the Jewish people and their covenantal relationship. There's all of these cultural, psychological elements that are soft but have had a certain influence. They thrived when Israel was a kind of social democratic, reasonable country — what in American terms could have been a kind of blue state like Connecticut or Rhode Island.
But in the '70s and '80s it became what in American terms is a purple state, back and forth between right-wing and centrist left-wing governments — Labour — not knowing what to do with the territories: trade them for peace or annex them forcibly. But now, for the last two decades or more, it's really been a deeply red state, like Idaho or Oklahoma in America. It's become very extreme. And that has had a tremendous impact on the lobby, because the lobby can no longer defend the extreme policies that the current Israeli government promotes — whether it's settlements, or support for violent settlers, or the war in Gaza, or genocide, or an attack on Iran, or the displacement of a million people in Lebanon. The lobby doesn't even try to defend it. And yet they still demand of the American government that there be, quote unquote, "no daylight" between the United States and Israel. Having no daylight between you and a reasonable country is one thing, but having no daylight between you and a country which — using Israel's own definition of crazy — we show Israel has become, that raises the costs and makes the lobby try to campaign and support Israel without even mentioning Israel, because they can't defend its policies.
Eli Clifton: So this has had two major consequences for the lobby. Ian just touched on one of them, which is that they no longer try to defend Israel's policies so much. Instead, they try to shut down debate, smear people who criticise Israel. And they've actually gone beyond that now — they're trying to use the powers of the state to silence voices who are critical, be it through withholding grant funds to universities or by deporting green card holders who are critical of Israel.
But there is another thing that's happened, which is more of a negative consequence for the lobby: as Israel has shifted to the right, the lobby has found itself in a very uncomfortable position. I think they sort of came to a head during Obama's second term, with the Iran nuclear deal, when they found themselves having to take sides against a popular Democratic president's signature foreign policy initiative. And ultimately they were not able to bring Democrats along with them in doing so, and they lost — at least in the short term — with the JCPOA.
Now, what that really meant for them wasn't just a very embarrassing loss, which I think was very harmful to the lobby, but it also cemented the perception that the lobby had become partisan — which is something they had really avoided since their inception. They had succeeded to a large degree in avoiding entering into partisan battles up until that point. But after that, you see them entering into — they spin up a super PAC, they get involved in elections. Something fundamentally changes for AIPAC, which is the central and biggest group within Israel's lobby, and the way that it's perceived.
Again, they had had this great strength with their conferences — the annual conferences where they would get Democrats and Republicans to speak. That comes to an end with COVID, and they haven't started it up again, probably because they couldn't get the presence from both parties that they had had in the past. So that really was a major reputational hit, because the lobby's ability to project power — their ability to project that you can't challenge them, their ability to project that they had this broad bipartisan consensus — fell apart with the JCPOA, and they have not been able to regain the bipartisan credentials that they had really enjoyed for decades before that.
Ian Lustick: And in parallel, and right in line with that, the lobby has had to abandon relying on grassroots support in America for its clout and has shifted to relying on vast amounts of money donated and controlled by a very small number of extremely ideologically committed right-wing donors. And that's one of the things we go into in great detail in the book — the money trail. It's linked to Israel becoming so extreme that the lobby can't rely on mass support, whether it's in the Jewish community or now increasingly even in the evangelical community, to support its activities. So more and more of the power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of ultra-wealthy people.
Eli Clifton: The cracks in the evangelical community are very serious for the Israeli government, not just the lobby. This is the group that was supposed to be the actual high-salience voters — although the polling doesn't really support that — suggesting that they were the ones who actually went to the polls and voted down the line for candidates who are pro-Israel, who were conservative, in deep red states. And they're starting to see cracks in that as well, mostly in the aftermath and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where for a variety of reasons, Christian evangelicals — who again the lobby had wanted us to believe would never break with Israel — are doing so. They're doing so partly because they are offended by the slaughter of civilians in Gaza. I think it also hit home to a lot of them: Israel's mistreatment of Christians, be they in Gaza, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, or in Lebanon. The fact that the Israelis don't seem to make that much of a differentiation between Palestinians who are Muslim and those who are Christian. And I think that's been a wake-up call.
Again, this has set off what I think is a five-alarm fire in Israel with the Israeli government, because for the very first time we see them now spending significant sums of money — directed from Israel — to people inside the United States to run publicity campaigns targeting evangelical voters. These people are filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, something we've very rarely seen with Israel before. This is more consistent with the way Gulf monarchies try to gain influence within the United States. So I think there is some desperation. There's a great deal of fear. And if we believe that where the Israeli government is spending this money and having this panicked response is reflective of a real danger, it suggests that they are losing support at a dangerous level within pro-Israel Christian evangelical communities in deep red states.
Israel as a "crazy state" — and the role of money in politics
Glenn Diesen: Just two quick follow-up questions. One was the word describing Israel as a "crazy state" — indeed, that's the name of the third chapter, so I assume that was not coincidental. Why use "crazy" as a separate category? And the second was: you mentioned all these different mechanisms, all this money being pumped in, so politicians will vote in a certain way. But how does that money mix with other mechanisms — ideology, public opinion, or genuine conviction?
Ian Lustick: I'll deal with the "crazy" and Eli can deal with the legal situations that help produce the money problems in the United States.
Yes, the chapter about Israel is called "Israel Is a Crazy State." It uses the definition of the word "crazy" that was advanced in the early 1970s by Israel's leading public policy authority, a man by the name of Yehezkel Dror, who won the Israel Prize for his work in this field. He wrote a book called Crazy States in which he said that like Nazi Germany, all of the Arab states and the PLO should be considered either crazy or becoming crazy. Not because they were irrational, but because their goals were so grandiose, so extreme, and their ruthlessness in using any means to achieve those goals meant they were crazy. And because they thought that even if the whole world thought they were breaking moral rules, they were actually right. So there's a certain self-righteousness that also goes along with being crazy in this way.
So it's not that you're insane or irrational. Certainly not — according to this definition, you have to have a lot of capacity and you have to be very rational about using that capacity. But what marks you as crazy is how extreme and how ruthless and how self-righteous you are, how impervious you are to any criticism. All that we do in that chapter is show that Israel has come to fit the mould of what Dror said Arab states were like.
Now, Dror wrote that book in order to tell the West and Israelis that any means could be used to thwart or destroy a state that is crazy. He was trying to justify preventive war, subversion, all kinds of other delegitimisation of all the states who were Israel's enemies. What's ironic and kind of amazing is that decades later — and Dror is still alive, by the way — decades later, his definition works more on Israel than for almost any other country in the world. So that's what is meant by a crazy state, and that chapter documents the change from what Israel was in the past to what it has unfortunately become.
One other thing we can talk about is how American policy helped turbocharge that change in Israel — that without the unconditional support that American presidents, for the reasons we've talked about, have given Israeli policy, we would likely not see quite the crazy Israel that we see today.
Eli Clifton: The interesting role of money that you raised — it's very difficult to answer what politicians actually believe, what any individual actually believes. But the tension that I think is really worth calling attention to is between public opinion — certainly within the Democratic Party and increasingly so in the Republican Party — and policy. And I think the money explains that to a significant degree.
What I'm pointing to is, for instance, looking at the last election: the largest reason given by voters who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and had not voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election — the largest reason they gave for why they had changed the way they voted was because of Gaza and the administration's handling of that war. And now you see something like two-thirds of Democratic voters saying that they want to see a complete drawdown of US aid to Israel. But we are not yet seeing a meaningful change in policy. We did have a majority of House Democrats voting for cutting aid, but they did so knowing that they were not going to win that vote.
And I think it is really interesting to look for where that breaking point might be — where politicians realise that the pressures they are feeling from their constituents actually are going to have to lead to meaningful policy change. We are not there yet.
Now, that has created a massive gap between public opinion and policy. And as we try to show in the book, probably the best explanation for why we have that large gap is the money that the lobby is able to shovel into elections. The numbers are pretty staggering. Nine donors since 2012 have put over $1.7 billion into our election system. These individuals all speak about Israel as being the primary reason for their political engagement and for their giving to politicians.
Just this cycle, we saw something like $30 million from the United Democracy Project — AIPAC's super PAC — trying to influence the outcome of just one Democratic primary election for the Senate in Michigan, trying to get Haley Stevens elected instead of Abdul El-Sayed. They failed in that endeavour. But the amount of money we're watching just in this cycle — I have this tracker that I post at israellobby.com. It updated over the weekend. It now says that pro-Israel super PACs in this cycle alone have raised $168 million and spent $153 million. And we're not even done with the primaries yet. Meaning that by the time we have the elections in November, it's entirely possible that they will raise and spend a quarter of a billion dollars. This is a midterm election. What that means for the next presidential election, we can only speculate. But the point is that they are bringing unprecedented amounts of money. They are increasing the amount of money they are spending in every single political cycle since Citizens United. And I think the only explanation for this is that they are filling that gap once again between opinion and policy.
I think we are probably reaching a breaking point at some point in the very near future where we're going to start seeing that translate into policy. But to be very clear, that has not happened yet. I just think it's probably going to be happening in the next two to four years.
Antisemitism, dual loyalty, and the conflation of Israel with Jews
Glenn Diesen: It does look like within the United States, as economic differences continue to grow, there's more concern about essentially being ruled by the wealthy — that the rich will dominate. So within this framework, you do see people looking at where the money comes from, who's corrupting the politicians, why don't they actually listen to the people. And it looks like, from this perspective, it's probably one of the reasons why more people are looking towards Israel as one of the variables corrupting the US. But at the same time, my concern would be: once one starts to look for where wealth corrupts politics, suddenly one would switch from "the Israelis are corrupting US policy" to "the Jews are running America." That becomes a bit more dangerous. So how do you see this difference, because often one gets the impression that the Israel lobby itself likes to conflate Israel with Jews?
Eli Clifton: Well, that's something we really try to emphasise in the book repeatedly, and I think even in the introduction we touch on it. To be very clear, it is an antisemitic trope to suggest that Jews all vote prioritising Israel, a foreign country. It is an antisemitic trope to suggest that Jews inherently have dual loyalties. And while it is true there are antisemites who take this argument — as you just pointed out — and apply it to all Jews, I think certainly in our mainstream political discourse, the biggest propagators of that trope is the Israel lobby itself, because this is probably one of the last arguments they can try to make: to lean in on an antisemitic argument and say that any criticism of them is a criticism of all Jewish Americans.
Now, it's objectively and demonstrably false. When you look at how Jewish Americans vote, it's a low-salience issue — Israel — for Jewish American voters. Also, Jewish American voters have not shifted to the right. They have not started to vote Republican. The Jewish swing vote is fictional. It does not exist. It is one of the most consistently Democratic-voting blocs within our country. They have not moved, even as most people would say that the Republican Party has become the more pro-Israel of the two political parties. So it's simply false. But you watch AIPAC, you watch the ADL, you watch these groups — even Donald Trump echoes some of these canards with frequency — because this is the last-ditch justification that the lobby can come up with about why they should not be criticised, why they should not have to defend themselves, and why it is somehow okay that they are trying to influence our politics as a special interest within our democracy.
Ian Lustick: I'll add that Eli and I are Jewish, and that itself is not that important except that it's representative of what we now see in polls as most Jews who are not only critical of the current government of Israel — Netanyahu — but who do not identify with the country strongly, who reject Zionism in the forms that it has taken. So it is a canard to talk about a Jewish lobby, even though the overwhelming majority of these large donors that we're talking about are Jewish. Now, that is not a good look for Jews. I agree it resonates with all kinds of wrong, crazy conspiracy theories that are not true. But that bad look — of a small number of extremely wealthy Jews manipulating things from behind the scenes — is a function, as we've said, of the change in American electoral laws, and the change in Israel, whose policies are so far to the right that it cannot get support from the masses of Jews, only from a small group of extremely right-wing donors and some of their other supporters.
Now, another way that we go into this in the book is to talk about the engineering of accusations of antisemitism that the lobby has endorsed in order to avoid having to talk about or defend Israeli policies. And the key element in this campaign — which the lobby has been using for decades, supported by the Israeli government — is to define antisemitism so broadly as to include just about any criticism of Israel, by treating Israel as what they call "the collective Jew." So then any criticism of Israel as the collective Jew is an attack on all Jews. And that's one reason why all these statistics that are bruited about regarding a so-called tsunami of antisemitism are really inflated — because what they do is take criticism of Israel or demonstrations against Israeli policies in Gaza and count all of those episodes, all of those incidents, all of those slogans — which are perfectly legitimate political debate — as antisemitism.
We, on the other hand, believe that our analysis clearly separates between real antisemitism and criticism of Israel, and that can help recognise the actual threat of rising antisemitism. A threat that doesn't come about because of October 7th, because of the attack of Hamas on Israelis. It comes about as a result of October 8th — the enormous, overreaction of the Israeli military on civilisation itself in the Gaza Strip. And that's what has produced this upsurge of antisemitism, because Israel claims it's acting in the name of the Jewish people. And that helps fuel a latent antisemitism to come into the open as attacks on Jews who have nothing to do with Israeli policy.
Eli Clifton: Something that is really important here is that the question you asked obviously touches on political and cultural sensitivities, and people are afraid often to talk about these issues — not that they will say something or actually be antisemitic, but that they will be accused of being antisemitic. And one of the arguments we've tried to make is that that silencing is intentional, and refusing to have this conversation does an enormous disservice. It actually cedes much of this ground to a combination of antisemites and Israel's lobby that wants to propagate both antisemitic tropes as well as the notion that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. We reject that. We think it's actually important — more people need to be out there challenging these notions. To not do so is to give a dangerous amount of ground both to antisemites as well as those who want to conflate Israel with all Jews.
State power weaponised against critics of Israel
Glenn Diesen: I saw Marco Rubio recently make that leap — he was giving a speech arguing that it's important for the United States to protect the Jewish community, which makes sense. And then suddenly, thus, we're not going to grant any more entry visas to people who criticise Israel. So I thought it was interesting how one was directly tied to the other. But I'm also thinking this must create some tensions within US society, because as Israel turns more towards this right-wing radicalism, you see that overall Jewish voters in America tend to vote more liberal than others. So it is an interesting tension — in terms of alienating the people Israel pretends or argues that it actually represents.
Eli Clifton: I think it's alienated a larger group than even just that. Certainly in the wake of the Gaza war, it has laid that bare — particularly the targeting of people for speech crimes for criticising a foreign country on an American university campus and criticising US foreign policy. The dramatic backlash to this is something I've watched play out on both the right and the left, as it really offends people's sensibilities at a baseline level around the First Amendment.
And again, you can tie this back to the donors who are in many ways in control of this administration and more broadly of our political system. The president of the Maccabee Task Force — which is one of the key organisations that has pushed for both the crackdowns on universities through the withholding of federal funds as well as the deportation of green card holders — is also the president's biggest donor, Miriam Adelson. So you don't have to look very far to see that there's a small group of people here who are willing to use not just their money for lobbying or to influence elections, but to try to weaponise the state in the service of cracking down and stifling criticism of Israel.
Ian Lustick: So what is actually going on now is an attack not just on the arguments that people make — as if they are antisemitic — and not just on the people who are making the arguments, but what we see with the Trump administration in league with the lobby is an attack on the institutions that produce those people. The elite academic institutions, the media, the entertainment industry are all subject to attack and to punishment, prosecution, deportations, questioning whether they should be able to keep their licences, and so on — all in order to suppress discussion about Israel.
Now, these pressures on American society are felt inside the Jewish community itself. Just look at almost any synagogue that's not Orthodox, and you will see a tremendous split between those who are still trying to go along with the Israel lobby's line that Israel is our answer to the Holocaust, and more and more of the Jews in those congregations who can't stomach what they're seeing on television. The result is that in congregation after congregation — Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist — rabbis can't even talk about Israel because it divides their congregation so deeply.
The end of the two-state solution and the path forward
Glenn Diesen: You argue in terms of how it's possible to move forward with the crisis in the Middle East, especially the Palestinian issue. After decades of settlements and territorial expansion, you argue that the two-state framework is increasingly unfeasible. Now, if the two-state solution doesn't work anymore, I was wondering what the alternatives are for the US in terms of its independent policy — irrespective of what Israel pushes. Because the way I see it, if you only have one state and approximately half of greater Israel are Jewish, the only way you can have an ethnostate will be either apartheid — one set of rules for one group and another for another — or ethnic cleansing, pushing them out to Egypt, or killing them through genocide. But beyond apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, what are the options now, given that the two-state solution is undermined?
Ian Lustick: You frame the problem very well. There is no such thing as a two-state solution anymore. Israel is not going to withdraw from any territories that would make a possible Palestinian state. But that doesn't mean that there can't be a better future than there is today. You are starting out with an Israeli version of apartheid. The difference is that it's silent. The South Africans were proud to say, "Yes, we discriminate systematically. We don't allow all these people to vote." Israel just says, "We're waiting for the two-state solution or something else." So in the meantime, these people are not allowed to vote — but it's actually silent apartheid.
The question therefore becomes: how do you change a regime that is partly democratic but excludes half the population from democracy? How does that change? And historically, we have a lot of examples of that. Women — half the population — were excluded from democratic politics in Western European countries and the United States for hundreds of years. Blacks, Irish Catholics, Jews — the exclusion of large groups is something that often occurs. And what happens is that over decades and even longer processes, democracies reach out and include those excluded groups, because the splits within the majority group force one side of the majority group to reach out to enfranchise blacks, or women, or Irish Catholics.
That kind of unguided, long-term change is what can produce a future of democracy and equality. But it's not a solution, because we can't say exactly how to do it from now. What we have to do is look at ending the occupation through speaking truth about what's going on, acting on our values, and having the occupation end through everyone under one government with equal rights — rather than a territorial withdrawal that is simply not going to occur. And talking about it as if it might occur has to be recognised as simply a technique to preserve apartheid in a silent form.
Eli Clifton: There is a bit of a trick here, and I don't think you were engaging with it, Glenn, but I know that critics of ours would frequently use this: to say that unless you can put forward a clear pathway to an alternative to the two-state solution, then the obvious direction US policy should go is continuing to sustain the same status quo policies of supporting Israel through whatever process it's going through.
Now, I think that in and of itself is a clever trap, because it is to say that unless we can provide the alternative — and again, we are a country 6,000 miles away — then we need to continue to sustain Israel's military and provide them not just the military aid, but the diplomatic cover that we provide, where they do not experience consequences in the international forum for their actions. And that is one I really reject, because it is not necessarily our job to lay out the specific solution to Israel's decision to occupy the West Bank, to reoccupy Gaza, to fight wars with its neighbours. This is something that can really only be answered by the Israelis and the Palestinians and others in the region.
And we need to ask: does our support, does US aid, does the diplomatic cover that we provide make it more likely that there will be some sort of solution found by the people who are most affected by it — inside the region, who are Israelis, Palestinians, and others? And I would argue that this "solutionism," as it were, does not actually further the likelihood of that occurring. It actually stifles solutions that may come along sooner rather than later, were the United States to step back a little bit from being the supposedly the source from which these solutions will come.
Ian Lustick: Absolutely right. This notion that solutionism is the problem is not well understood in politics. You almost never get a solution where everyone now lives happily ever after. What you get, hopefully, are better problems tomorrow than you have today. And so when we look at the problems of trying to bring democracy and equality to the two huge populations that live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, that's a much better problem to have than how to enforce an extraordinarily oppressive, murderous regime that is now saying this is the status quo — better than all others. No. The problems associated with that — the Iran war, the Lebanon war, the Gaza war, all of these, the Hamas attack as well — those are worse problems than the problem of confronting how you build an equal democracy for everyone who lives between the river and the sea. That's a much better problem.
The lobby's end stage — and the growing gap between public opinion and policy
Glenn Diesen: I like the way you frame that. To be honest, I hadn't thought about that — it makes a lot of sense. So I just have one last question, which is: you emphasise this growing gap between the American public and Washington's ongoing support for Israel. But at the same time, we also see now that the conditions might be in place for its decline. I was wondering if you can flesh out your thinking — why has this gap persisted, and why might the decline come now?
Eli Clifton: I think we're in some sort of an end stage, but of course timing these things is a fool's errand, just like trying to time the stock market. This end stage is very, very dangerous, because as we've been discussing over the course of this hour, the lobby has lost much of the public support that it has enjoyed. And moreover, because we keep emphasising it — it was a low-salience issue — probably it's become much worse, not because it's lost that support so much as that it's actually become high-salience in a negative sense. People increasingly feel like the US-Israel relationship is toxic and needs to be changed in some pretty dramatic ways. Most specifically, the most common polling question asked of voters is: do you support a cutoff of US aid and assistance to Israel? And again, a majority within the Democratic Party feel that way, and a growing number within the Republican Party as well.
So they've lost that battle, and that leaves the lobby with these coercive, really dangerous tools at their disposal, which they have shown a real willingness to use — again, using state power to try to stifle criticism, to try to deport people who run afoul of them. And in that we see this intersection of plutocracy and state power and a foreign power — all being used to the detriment of American voters, being used to challenge popular sentiments within this country. And obviously, I think history shows us that usually that's a losing proposition. But in losing, one can do an enormous amount of damage. I wouldn't want to guess about where this will end, or when we will see that real break in the dam where policy changes in a meaningful sense. But what I will say is that I think the lobby, and the people who are funding it and who lead it, they themselves consider this to be an existential battle for themselves, because they have put everything into this.
Glenn Diesen: Excellent. I want to thank you both for taking the time, and I would like for the viewers to check out the book in the description. Definitely, it couldn't be a more relevant time — as we now see, at least in my lifetime, I've never seen this kind of criticism of the relationship between Israel and the United States. And at least it's good to see some reflection over this. I remember when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote a book roughly twenty years ago on a similar topic — it had a lot of backlash and was smeared when it should have been discussed. But I think now is obviously an even better time to discuss this problematic relationship. So thank you both, unless you have any final thoughts.
Ian Lustick: Thank you, Glenn. That was very enjoyable, and I hope your viewers come away with as much curiosity as satisfaction.
Eli Clifton: Thank you, Glenn.