Back in 2017, an Israeli diplomat in London was recorded demanding action against Alan Duncan, then a British foreign office minister. Soon after, Duncan went to brief the department’s ranking civil servant on the revelation, recalling the exchange in his diary: “I teasingly remind[ed] him . . . of what I said to him on my first day as a minister. ‘Simon . . . didn’t I tell you? The CFI [Conservative Friends of Israel] and the Israelis think they control the Foreign Office. And they do!’”

For some on the Left, complaints like Duncan’s exemplify wrongheaded conspiratorial theories about the omnipotence of Israel and its lobby. We are told by such opponents of the Israel lobby thesis that the tail cannot wag the dog and that Israel serves American strategic interests — then, now, and forever more.

“The value to US imperial power of Israel — a dependable, militarily powerful ally in a geostrategically crucial region of the world — is perfectly obvious, and requires no lobbying to be understood,” the British commentator David Wearing writes. In a book-length study of the lobby released last year, scholar Hil Aked argues similarly. Suggestions that support for Israel is contrary to American national interests and that the lobby bears responsibility for this distortion, Aked insists, are “problematic”: misguided “progressive nationalism” at best, “potentially xenophobic in tone” at worst. These are predetermined political rehearsals, at some remove from concrete analysis of the concrete situation.