The genocide in Gaza and the US’s unrelenting support for Israel have thrust an old debate about the nature of such support into new light. Some say Israel is a strategic asset that serves the US by containing radical nationalists, whether secular or Islamist, who threaten American interests in the region. Others say a certain highly motivated and ethnocentric moneyed faction has largely aggressively asserted its dominance in the halls of power, leading the US to support Israel far beyond any rational calculation of cost-benefit could justify. A useful intervention in this ongoing debate is Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s Israel’s Lobby - a tour de force through the ins and outs of the lobby and its effects on the body politic. Yet questions remain about what it precisely implies about the nature of the ruling order.

Israel’s Lobby begins with its strongest chapter, elucidating in raw numbers the extent of the Israel lobby’s participation in government, the mechanics of its influence, and the ways in which it shapes outcomes. Later chapters illustrate the dysfunction and discord produced in the Middle East as well as the United States as a consequence of the unabated and thoroughgoing support for Israel secured by the actions of the lobby.

The lobby has a few major weapons in its arsenal that it can put to use in shaping US foreign policy, and it is generally in these respects that it is largely incomparable to other foreign policy lobbies. It invests a great deal in ambitious and ideologically motivated staffers and representatives in Congress, who can be well placed in relevant committees and subcommittees to secure funding for pro-Israel bills and funding initiatives. It whips otherwise neutral or marginally oppositional politicians into support for said bills or initiatives, either via flak in the press or, upstream, by threatening to support or outright supporting their rivals in races. It works to highly restrict the scope of debate around Israel and the lobby to prevent critical discussion and limit scrutiny around its activities and Israel’s actions.

Clifton and Lustick provide useful examples of definitive, if arguably somewhat narrow, cases where support for Israel seemingly comes into conflict with American national security interests. They establish in the first chapter the apparently largely unchallenged norm of leaking US intelligence to Israel which prevails in lobby circles. They also review some of the traditional examples proffered by exponents of the lobby thesis, such as Truman’s support for the initial establishment of the State of Israel against the wishes of the foreign policy establishment, as the proto-lobby threatened to withhold crucial Jewish votes in New York. They also note the situations with both Ford and Carter, who wanted to push for comprehensive regional settlements but were forced to back down by aggressive lobbyists conscripting dozens of congressional officials to write letters condemning their moves.

After the discussion of the broad thesis, the architecture of the lobby, and so on, they pivot to the twin shifts in Israeli and American politics, respectively. The former, as reflected in poll numbers, academia, culture, and most relevant here, in the upper echelons of policy, has moved increasingly to the right. War and militarism are increasingly viewed as the primary mechanism of resolving outstanding Middle Eastern issues, whether in Occupied Palestine, Syria, or Lebanon. They take a somewhat implicitly Post-Zionist view of Israel’s character wherein whatever its flaws may have been prior to 1967, the Six-Day War marked the decisive juncture in Israeli history and its trajectory. The pre-emptive attack and the creeping annexation of lands far beyond the Green Line put it on a path which reflected the mark of a “crazy state” - one which can’t be deterred by ordinary means. Parallel to this trend is the increased association of Israel as a cause of the Republican Party. Though its support continues to remain bipartisan to some extent at the highest echelons, the Republicans have largely tied their fate to Netanyahu and the Likud Party.

The book has many advantages; while it is sometimes implied in the press that Israel’s Lobby serves as a spiritual successor or a redux of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, in many ways it overcomes certain limitations of their book.^[1] While Clifton and Lustick reiterate the overall picture of the lobby painted by Mearsheimer and Walt and the way it operates, they treat the lobby less in isolation. Whereas the Israel Lobby is strictly realist, Clifton and Lustick embed their critique in a broader critique of growing American inequality and how this is reflected in politics. Additionally, while no major knock against Mearsheimer and Walt, because The Israel Lobby was written around the time of the Iraq War, there was a slight need to make its thesis relevant to current events, causing time to have been spent trying to show how Israel pushed for the Iraq War. While the efforts of Jewish neoconservatives certainly played an important role in selling the invasion, the actual feeling in Tel Aviv was more mixed as compared with the constant anti-Iran drumbeat in security circles, the general public, and, of course, the lobby (which Clifton and Lustick document) well before the initial attack even happened.

A largely unstated assumption of Israel’s Lobby is that but for the Israel lobby, the US would pursue a more balanced relationship with Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Certain individual presidents, say Jimmy Carter, have certainly leaned more in that direction than others. But while this may have been true prior to the 1990s, when there were many states jockeying for the role of the defenders of the Palestinians, with the Oslo Accords and the integration of Israel into the global economy, today there is largely very little incentive for any state to press on Palestinian self-determination very hard. Although many Arab states have huffed and puffed about not crossing some imaginary line which would signify full normalization, in reality economic integration has long proceeded apace and states like the UAE appear to be pushing even harder to shed whatever limits the Gulf had previously regarded as sacrosanct. In Resisting Erasure, Adam Hanieh notes,

Importantly, however, this twinning of liberalisation and normalisation was explicitly accompanied by a deepening of US economic and political influence in the region. One indication of this was the Qualifying Industrial Zones programme (QIZs), which aimed to tie Israeli and Arab markets to one another through the mediation of the US economy. These low-wage manufacturing zones were first established in Jordan and Egypt in the late 1990s. Goods produced in the QIZs (mostly textiles and garments) were given duty-free access to the US. To gain this access, however, they had to be jointly produced with Israeli investors. Through this crucial requirement, the QIZs played an early and decisive role in bringing together Israeli, Jordanian, and Egyptian capital in joint ownership structures under US influence – normalising economic relations between two of the Arab states that neighbour Israel. By 2007, the US government was reporting that more than 70 per cent of Jordan’s exports to the US came from QIZs; for Egypt, 34 30 per cent of exports to the US were produced in QIZs in 2008… the policy successfully drove an expansion of US economic influence in the region, underpinned by normalisation between Israel and key Arab states. Pointedly, today the US has fourteen FTAs with countries across the world: five of these are with states in the Middle East (Israel, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, and Oman).^[2]

Much of the book is dedicated to illustrating precisely the manifold forces which work to shore up the Zionist project, with no equivalent Palestinian force backed by a national bourgeoisie (apart from diaspora capital diffused throughout the Gulf). Although there almost certainly would have been less friction if the US had forced Israel to the table on a two-state solution earlier, they have largely proceeded successfully in creating a regional order favorable to them without it.

What Clifton and Lustick do not ultimately settle are epistemologically thornier questions around what constitutes distortion of an otherwise nationally oriented US foreign policy by the Israel lobby. For example, there was a strong push in the 90s to press for economic normalization with China, and although there were misgivings pressed on by public interest groups and unions, advocates of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) were able to thrust their program onto the Clinton-Bush agenda successfully. While it should be noted that although there was technically a China lobby, it was largely moribund at this point, and in any case would’ve opposed moves in this direction, at least in theory. So from where did this support come from? Largely politicians serving as ambassadors of industry and trade groups representing big business, particularly agriculture and what would become Silicon Valley. These were generally domiciled and run in the US and, by and large, by men who almost certainly thought of themselves as patriotic Americans who cited the national interest in defense of their position. It just so happened that their positions aligned with the interests of their bottom line. Though its precise effects remain subject to debate, the gains of “China Shock” were highly concentrated at the top. Clifton and Lustick don’t exactly spell out what the “national interest” is supposed to be or how one goes about deriving it from first principles or the historical record. They hint that, at present, it entails great power competition with China, i.e., the so-called Pivot to Asia. However, the set of policies that came to become part of the core of the pivot as implemented by Obama came with their own set of costs. One major plank, for instance, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Hilary Clinton’s association with it, to a certain degree even cost her the election in 2016.

Additionally, though they do discuss cases where the lobby failed to achieve its desired outcome, they don’t specify why the lobby may fail in certain cases. As the authors discuss, they performed disastrously in both the 2016 Republican presidential primaries and the general election, for instance. Trump ultimately carried out their program, but he was not strictly an ideologue nurtured carefully by the lobby. This points to an area where the thesis could’ve been developed beyond the idea of an external lobby pushing politics in a specific direction, which is a concrete discussion of the social milieu that generates this politics. For instance Van der Pijl in his work, The Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class, illustrates the origins of the Atlantic Alliance in the synthesis of liberal imperialist and the monopoly capital wings of the American ruling class (congealed in corporate liberalism) which sought to resolve the problem of overproduction, driven by the latter, by opening markets abroad, driven by the former with European elites seeking to join to defend their interests against mass movements of the working class all under an ideological umbrella of Atlanticism.^[3] So then what are the fractions of capital that back the US-Israel alliance, and what is their stake in the politics of Zionism? Nitzan and Belcher, for example, explore some of what they call the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition as a driving force in the alliance. The basic theory of it is well-trodden territory in the literature of US imperialism in the Middle East, but they put their own particular spin on it. They argue the arms industry links conflicts, often led by Israel, to higher energy prices, which increases profit rates that can be recycled, via petrodollars, back into the arms industry and so on, with the process being set in motion by stagnant profits in need of juicing.^[4]

But it’s not as though things froze in time; although Van der Pijl develops a highly thoughtful account of the making of the Atlantic Alliance (with Glassman extending his work to the Pacific Ruling Class and Asian authoritarian developmentalism) which similarly have ideologies that structure transnational alliances of various fractions of national capitals, there is a certain rigidity about this framework that does not allow it to fully capture the constant shifting nature of the US-Israel alliance.^[5] Because Israel is a small state, its ability to project influence depends strongly on its ability to build coalitions, adapt, and co-opt developments in its favor. Israel’s strategy of aligning with minorities has not just served it in the region (for example backing Kurdish or Druze separatists in Iraq and Syria respectively) but in the US as well. By trading their support at key moments during the Civil Rights movement or making use of their ability to pass as White to sponsor certain African American artists in the industry (it should be said often on highly asymmetric terms), they were able to secure durable support from elites (around 50% of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus for instance received support from AIPAC at some point). Another more recent example that illustrates this dynamic is the debate over ByteDance. This was, in essence, a struggle over the perception that young people were being hypnotized by the TikTok algorithm into support for Palestine. But those supportive of Israel, even those not traditionally part of the lobby, were able to leverage the concerns of parents fearful of excessive phone usage and anti-China hawks into support for forcing its sale. Even a group previously perceived as dovish, even Arabist, who sought out a diplomatic settlement - the oilmen - have largely changed their tune. The so-called shale revolution shifted the priorities of the oilmen from protecting their assets/investments in the Middle East to doubling down on their alignment with the Republican Party and Netanyahu to defend “energy independence”.

Ultimately, these are not highly problematic exclusions; one can only cover so much ground in one book. The question of which forces play a primary role in hardening the US-Israel relationship is not easily quantifiable, and the book remains a credible challenge to any naive theory of the relationship as one driven purely by any highly abstract notion of national interest (or the reverse). Most importantly, it provides some hints to socialist movements in liberal democracies around how best to formulate what would almost certainly have to be a key plank in any serious minimum program - an end to oligarchic politics via lobbying.

1. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), [229-262].

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2. Adam Hanieh, Rob Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah, Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (London: Verso Books, 2025), [56-57].

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3. Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso Books, 1984)

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4. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2002), [198-268].

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5. Jim Glassman, Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980 (Leiden: Brill, 2018)

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