The myth of the “Israel Lobby” has come a long way from its dusty origins at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an essay published in the London Review of Books in 2006, and then a book published in 2007. Written by academics John Mearshemier of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, it purported to describe a vast conspiracy of individuals and organizations all working together to steer American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction against what they considered to be the country’s best interests.
At the heart of this conspiracy theory was the notion that the main pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, was at the center of a cabal that was, in their formulation, composed of just about everyone who mattered in foreign policy, politics and the media.
A moral panic over Jewish money
That this inflated the organization that, then and now, was actually far from being one of the most powerful or wealthy players in D.C. lobbying, into an entity that seemed to be pulling the strings of both major political parties, was absurd. But that hasn’t prevented AIPAC from becoming the focus of a moral panic about the role of money in politics.
This agitation may be a thinly veiled effort behind a 21st-century revival of one of the key smears of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century antisemitic hoax. That farrago of lies concocted by Tsarist Russian agents spoke of Jews using ill-gotten wealth to manipulate the great powers.
Yet, despite its falsity, what started with Mearsheimer and Walt has become an article of faith among many Democrats who now compete with each other to proclaim their refusal to take any funds from AIPAC or its supporters. Indeed, even in races in which no candidates are backed by AIPAC or anyone in the pro-Israel community, AIPAC has become an issue.
In the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district, the results hinged on the ability of State Representative Chris Rabb, a radical anti-Israel candidate, not only to succeed by embracing a blood libel about the Jewish state’s committing “genocide” in Gaza. His victory, which will allow him to join the growing ranks of the left-wing “Squad” in Congress next January, rested on his falsely depicting his slightly more moderate opponents as somehow tainted by Jewish money.
This tactic isn’t working everywhere. Notably, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the libertarian extremist who picked fights with President Donald Trump, was defeated in a Republican primary, despite depicting the Kentucky farmer and former Navy SEAL who challenged him as somehow being the candidate of “Tel Aviv.”
But in Democratic primaries around the nation, and even as part of the early maneuvering among 2028 presidential contenders, AIPAC has become a dirty word that all but a few members of the party, including those who were thought of as at least nominally pro-Israel, want nothing to do with.
As liberal publications like The New York Times and Politico have documented, the scramble to dissociate themselves from AIPAC has grown to the point at which few Democrats will admit to taking money from pro-Israel sources. Avowals of refusing support from the group is one of the ways liberals, as well as those who call themselves as “progressives,” virtue-signal their supposed independence and integrity.
Few Republican officeholders are doing the same. With Massie exiting Congress, the GOP House and Senate caucuses will be virtually unanimous in their support for Israel and comfort with AIPAC. But the same drumbeat of incitement in which the lobby is asserted to be the locus of a Zionist conspiracy has become a standard talking point for popular podcasters like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
But rather than accept this trend as merely a function of worries about the influence of “dark money” in a corrupt system of campaign financing, it’s time to label the obsession with AIPAC for what it is: bigotry.
From its origins with the Mearsheimer and Walt essay and book, the attempt to portray the “Israel Lobby” as the evil actor distorting American foreign policy wasn’t just a mischaracterization of the group’s work or a critique of pro-Israel politics. It is nothing less than antisemitic scapegoating whose purpose is to silence and isolate Jews and those who support the one Jewish state on the planet.
The real conspiracy
The real conspiracy threatening to twist American foreign policy against the national interests of the United States is the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists—joined now by far-right antisemites like Carlson. They see tiny Israel and its Jewish supporters not just as the source of transcendent and unique evil behind all the world’s ills. They seek to distance Washington from its only democratic and reliable ally in the Middle East, which not only works side-by-side with it against enemies like Iran, but which, unlike Europe, doesn’t depend on Americans to do its fighting for it.
But conspiracy theories thrive on myths that provide a way for people to justify or rationalize their pre-existing prejudices. And, as antisemitism comes back into fashion just 80 years after the Holocaust, the furor about AIPAC is merely a symptom of a sickness that is eating away at the fabric of American democracy. The supposedly enlightened movement of “anti-racism” based on toxic ideologies like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism has become just a facade for the ancient virus of Jew-hatred.
We can trace the origins of this problem back to the launch of the “Israel lobby” myth.
Classic antisemitic tropes
As I wrote in 2006, this effort was a classic illustration of what historian Richard Hofstadter had described in the 1960s as “the paranoid style of American politics.” And the only thing that “differentiates Mearsheimer and Walt from the 19th-century antisemitic populists that Hofstadter wrote about—or even a contemporary example, such as Louisiana Klansman David Duke—is their credentials.”
But those credentials mattered at a time when academia was already becoming a bastion of hatred for Israel. Sober analysts pointed out Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s numerous factual errors and the fact their central thesis was rooted in the classic antisemitic trope about Jews working in devious and underhanded ways to manipulate the non-Jewish world to its detriment. Nevertheless, as is the case with so many other conspiracy theories, falsity didn’t stop it from gaining a wider audience on both the left and the far-right.
The book helped transform AIPAC’s image into something that, even at the time, sparked concerns about this caricature potentially providing ammunition for Jew-haters looking for a scapegoat around which they could build a campaign to demonize supporters of the Jewish state.
Two decades later, those fears have been proven all too prescient.
AIPAC was founded on bipartisan principles and a belief that fostering support for Israel in both parties was essential to the future of the alliance. This frustrated some in the Jewish world who worried about its refusal to acknowledge the way Democrats were moving away from support from Israel while Republicans were moving toward it. But that didn’t matter to those who wished to make it the focus of their animus for Israel.
Soros and Qatar spend more
Nor did the fact that AIPAC is far from the behemoth of lobbying and political fundraising.
As lobbies go, AIPAC is dwarfed by the money expended in Washington by the forces promoting the interests of major industries like pharmaceuticals, electronics, insurance, securities, oil and gas or real estate. Even with respect to political contributions, AIPAC is outspent by a group like the Democratic Party PAC Act Blue by a factor of 26 to 1.
On his own, George Soros, the left-wing Jewish philanthropist and political activist, has outspent AIPAC on lobbying and political campaigns by about 7 to 1 over the last 20 years. And when you compare AIPAC’s efforts to the more than $100 billion the emirate of Qatar has spent on spreading its influence and Islamist ideology in the United States, it’s clear that the disproportionate focus on the former is a sick joke.
The anti-AIPAC push must be seen in the context of the surge in antisemitism since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, the mainstream media’s embrace of Hamas propaganda about “genocide” has distorted discussions about the Middle East to the point at which the disconnect from the reality of the conflict is so great that liberals and even some on the right accept the lies as unchallenged truth.
In this manner, Israel is falsely accused of what its opponents actually wish to do. And the genocidal war that is actually being waged against it by Iran and its Islamist terror proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah, is either ignored or rationalized as a just cause.
Democrats are afraid
But there should be no reticence in calling out the rhetoric about AIPAC not merely as deceptive, but as an ancient prejudice dressed up in the clothes of 21st-century progressive intellectual fashion. The vicious narrative about AIPAC’s being a conspiracy to support “genocide” is so pervasive that even many Jewish Democrats won’t denounce it.
Some, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro,who claims to support Israel while opposing its government, rightly worries about the blurring of the distinction between AIPAC and money raised by Jewish citizens. But even he dodged questions about whether he would take money from AIPAC supporters in 2028, demonstrating that he fears taking on the anti-Israel prejudices of his party’s intersectional base.
At the same time, a lobby devoted specifically to funding Democrats running for the House who are against Israel got laudatory coverage in The New York Times. And just this week, Democrats nominated a candidate for a New Jersey House seat in a deep- blue district who has a history of volunteering for an Al Qaeda-linked group in the 1990s and was a friendly witness for the defendant in the 1995 trial of the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Egyptian cleric whose followers had bombed the World Trade Center two years earlier.
Adam Hamaway, currently a plastic surgeon who is now set to enter Congress next January, like Chris Rabb in Philadelphia, won his primary against less extreme opponents by being the loudest to cry “genocide” while railing against AIPAC.
The liberal press calls such politicians “progressives.” But the truth is that they and those in the media who are mainstreaming the narrative about AIPAC’s malign influence are bigots whose goal is to drive pro-Israel Jews and Christians out of the public square. Their efforts are depicted as a righteous cause, while the work of millions of Americans to ensure that Israel lives and that an alliance that is in their country’s interest thrives are smeared as puppets whose strings are pulled by a shadowy Jewish plot.
Whatever one may think about AIPAC or what an ideal system for campaign fundraising might look like, the effort to demonize it is just another antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
