The Israel Lobby Is Out of Control
Twenty years ago, scholars could be accused of antisemitism just for acknowledging the Israel lobby exists. Today the lobby’s influence has become an undeniable and ubiquitous issue in American politics.
FormerSecretary of State Antony Blinken delivers remarks at the 2023 AIPAC policy summit in Washington, DC, on June 5, 2023. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
In a year of record-breaking campaign spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and widespread popular revulsion at Donald Trump’s war on Iran, a deeply researched study of the Israel lobby couldn’t be timelier. Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman spoke with investigative journalist Eli Clifton and veteran scholar Ian Lustick about their new book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, which reveals how the lobby has not only warped Washington politics but accelerated Israel’s own ideological radicalization — and now threatens Americans’ civil liberties at home.
Seth Ackerman
Almost twenty years ago, the international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote a very famous and very controversial book called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Your book is in many ways a sequel to theirs. What made you decide the time was right for a book like this?
Eli Clifton
A lot has changed since 2007. Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer identified some of the global strategic costs that the lobby’s activities were imposing on Americans, and those have continued to amplify and magnify. But some of the other costs are more domestic in nature, and those were enabled by changes in our laws, which Steve and John could not have foreseen.
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