In Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick promise to pull back the curtain on what they believe is among the most important dynamics underlying today’s politics: the pro-Israel lobby’s alleged control over American foreign policy. However, they ultimately come up short. Rather than embrace the topic’s complexity, they reduce it to a two-dimensional caricature. This makes the book appear less like a dispassionate assessment of political dynamics and more like a polemic in the service of a broader ideological project to challenge the foundations of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
The first way the authors do this is by flattening the distinction between influence — which many lobbies have — and control, a charge that borders on conspiracism. Clifton and Lustick do everything they can to nudge readers toward the feeling that the pro-Israel lobby controls the U.S. They say America must “unshackle” itself from Israel. The first sentence of the jacket summary claims Israel’s “controlling interest” in U.S. foreign policy is currently the “greatest story in geopolitics and American domestic affairs.” And the introduction makes the false claim that Americans are “subjected to criminalization of criticism of Israel’s policies.”
But for it to be true that the pro-Israel lobby has the kind of control Clifton and Lustick suggest, it would have to be, at a minimum, the largest and most powerful lobby in Washington. The issue is that it is just not the case. According to OpenSecrets, Israel ranks 10th in foreign lobbying spending since 2016, and it has not cracked the top 10 since 2019. On domestic lobbying spending, the pro-Israel lobby spent $6.1 million in 2025. By contrast, the pharmaceutical industry spent about $457 million, the oil and gas industry spent nearly $150 million, the pro-climate lobby spent $36.6 million, and the gun rights lobby spent $14 million. There are literally dozens of lobbies that outspend pro-Israel groups. The pattern is the same in election spending: In the 2024 cycle, OpenSecrets tracked roughly $78 million from pro-Israel PACs, individual donors, and outside groups combined — an all-time high for the lobby’s election spending, which hovered around $15 million or less until 2016 — yet still placing it well outside the top echelon of interest group spending overall.
Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power;
By Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick;
Atria/One Signal;
304 pp.; $29.00
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Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power; By Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick; Atria/One Signal; 304 pp.; $29.00
To jump from the fact that the pro-Israel lobby is influential to the claim that it is controlling U.S. foreign policy is not justified by the evidence. Clifton and Lustick know this, which is why, despite making every effort to make the reader feel that pro-Israel forces control the U.S., they simultaneously label those who point this out as engaging in a “straw man” and hedge by writing that they are not really claiming the pro-Israel lobby is all-powerful. This backtracking offers plausible deniability, but the impression the authors leave remains unmistakable.
Formal lobbying and organizational campaign contributions are only one small part of it, Clifton and Lustick would argue. In fact, they tell us, nine “Israel first” individual donors have spent $1.7 billion on political donations since 2012 to enforce a pro-Israel consensus. However, they include people on their list who either do not say Israel is their primary issue or actually disagree with others on the list. Michael Bloomberg, for example, has spent orders of magnitude more money on issues such as education and gun safety than he has on pro-Israel initiatives, yet they consider all of his FEC-disclosed political donations (including to his own presidential campaign in 2020) as being primarily to buoy Israeli interests. The same is true of at least two other members of the list, one of whom, the authors note, “hasn’t spoken publicly about foreign policy,” and the other who “rarely spoke publicly about his foreign policy views.” It is unclear how one could count all of their election spending as being a tool of pro-Israel enforcement when they rarely even speak about the issue.
Further, the idea that these donors collectively manufacture a pro-Israel consensus is complicated by the fact that there is not even a consensus among themselves on Israel policy. Miriam Adelson is on the right of the Israeli political spectrum and has strongly opposed the two-state solution for decades. Four others mainly align with groups that oppose it. Yet, two donors on Clifton and Lustick’s list are explicitly supportive of it. The stance of the final two is unclear. Yet, they are all supposedly enforcing a single pro-Israel standard. To simplistically smush all of these people into one group is to erase crucial ideological distinctions and make the world seem simpler than it is.
Clifton and Lustick engage in similar analytical errors when discussing U.S. and Israeli history. They claim that President Harry Truman recognizing Israel shortly after it declared independence in 1948 was an example of his “own assessment of the nation’s interests” being “supplanted, if not directly overwhelmed, by Israel and its domestic US lobby.” The proof? Two quotes from Truman about how he does not like being inundated with letters from pro-Israel Americans, and the fact that his intelligence agencies opposed recognition. But neither of these historical facts is dispositive of the authors’ conclusion.
Dennis Ross, on the other hand, in his authoritative book on the U.S.-Israel relationship, Doomed to Succeed, writes that “Truman, for the most part, acted out of conviction, and not for political reasons.” He refused, in the fall of 1948, to go beyond de facto recognition of Israel and instead recognize it formally and legally. He was under pressure at the time to do so by a Democratic candidate for Connecticut governor, who said de jure recognition was “vital” for him to gain Jewish support necessary for him to win his election, and that it would also help Truman’s chance in his own race. Yet, Truman refused to do it, knowing it could harm his presidential bid and his fellow partyman’s gubernatorial bid. Truman also imposed a weapons embargo on Israel during its war for independence, and threatened to end U.S. support for Israel’s membership in the United Nations during that war unless it ceased its offensive against the Egyptians in the Sinai. These are not the actions of someone who is willing to be coerced by a foreign power.
A JURIST IN DEFENSE OF ISRAEL
While recounting other parts of history, Clifton and Lustick’s particular animus toward Israel becomes clear. They refer to the communities in Israel attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, once as “civilian settlements” and another time simply as “Israeli settlements,” likely leading many readers to mistakenly assume these were settler outposts outside of the Green Line. They refer to the phrase intifada as “a liberating tradition of popular mobilization,” whitewashing the hundreds of terrorist attacks and suicide bombings that characterized those campaigns. They note twice in seven pages that Benjamin Netanyahu testified to Congress in 2002 in favor of the Iraq war, omitting the crucial context that he was not in power at the time and the Israeli government warned Washington against the war. They even go as far as to suggest Israel is at fault for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by an Islamist group that later merged into al Qaeda, noting that signing a bilateral peace without resolving the Palestinian issue placed him in a dangerous situation.
The impression one is left with is that forwarding the overarching narrative of Israel as villain takes precedence over grappling with the true complexities of U.S.-Israel relations. The subject can and should be treated with the nuance it deserves, but doing so would collapse a thesis reliant on caricatures.
Jack Elbaum is a public opinion researcher in Washington, D.C.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
