Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power

An unflinching exposé of Israel’s lobby, showing how its outsized influence works against our national interests and threatens our freedom.

The greatest story in geopolitics and in American domestic affairs is how the far-right government of a small Middle Eastern country came to hold a controlling interest in United States foreign policy. Israel’s lobby is now in a position to police the speech of American politicians, college students and journalists, and coerce and persuade the White House to back unpopular, costly, and ultimately national security-threatening policies. From the Biden administration’s unwillingness to bring American leverage to bear an end to genocidal violence that only harmed our national security interests, to the Trump administration’s role in lifting the parole restrictions on a spy who had sold vital government secrets, American subservience to its putative client state, Israel, is a vivid and vexing example of the tail wagging the dog.

Israel’s Lobby combines investigative journalism and political science to tie together the stories of American and Israeli oligarchs capturing the policymaking process in successive presidential administrations and the geopolitical, national security and domestic consequences of American foreign policy effectively sold to the highest bidder. Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick explain how shifts in global politics, Israel’s lurch to the extreme right, and the evisceration of American campaign finance laws make the influence of Israel’s lobby more costly and more dangerous today than it ever was before, why the lobby launched an antisemitism witch hunt to suppress opponents rather than attempt to defend Israel's policies, and how the Lobby not only distorts American policy but helps make Israel a “crazy” state.

Israel’s Lobby follows the money and lifts the veil on a seemingly unassailable feature of American politics, importantly detailing how we can unite around traditional American values and the importance of substantive debate to resist Israel-first vigilantism.

Eli Clifton is an investigative journalist who focuses on money in politics and US foreign policy. He is a cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft where he serves as a senior adviser. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, The Intercept, The South China Morning Post, LobeLog, Salon, HuffPost, The Daily Beast, Slate, Gawker, Foreign Policy, and Responsible Statecraft.

Ian S. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Chair, Emeritus, in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He served in the Carter administration as the State Department’s expert on Israel-Palestine affairs and subsequently became a regular consultant with American administrations on US foreign policy and national security affairs. He is a founder and past President of the Association for Israel Studies and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.