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.

In their book’s conclusion, they argued that support for a “no daylight” relationship with Israel was slowly seeping away. They identified that trend as having begun around 1999 or 2000, with the death of the Oslo Accords and the closing of the window on the two-state solution. And they predicted that that slow decline would be met by the rise of other institutions — such as J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others — that would be able to advocate for a more normal and balanced US-Israel relationship and make it possible to wean US politics off the influence of the lobby.

But in 2010, the Citizens United and SpeechNow decisions came down. That opened the floodgates of our campaign finance system. Starting in 2012, which was the first post–Citizens United election, when you look at who the biggest donors were, it was Sheldon Adelson and other pro-Israel billionaire megadonors. And they said very explicitly that they were doing this for Israel.

So in the face of declining public support for Israel — which really accelerated post–October 7 across pretty much every demographic — that allowed them to create a stopgap.

Alongside the money, there was also a strategic shift. The lobby stopped trying to counter arguments like those of Mearsheimer and Walt. Instead they moved to completely shut down debate, including by using the power of the state to shut down speech critical of Israel. We saw that with the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding from universities, often in research areas that have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. Or in the attempts to deport green card holders simply because of their criticisms of a foreign country.

So we’re now paying a domestic price in terms of our own civil liberties. That’s a key part of what has changed since their book came out.

Ian Lustick

Israel did present itself as a crucial ally against Soviet penetration of the Middle East, though that claim was never very convincing to experts. In the book, we report a fascinating natural experiment that proved how empty the claim was. In 1991, one of the leading international relations analysts, A. F. K. Organski, a University of Michigan professor, published a book called The $36 Billion Bargain, which argued that Israel was like a land-based aircraft carrier: it was so useful to the United States in its struggle against the Soviet Union that all the aid we gave to it was a bargain.

And as part of his argument, he asked: How can we know this is true? Well, if the Soviet Union were to disappear and the Cold War were to end, we would see the aid drop. Now that’s exactly what happened right after his book was published. The Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Cold War ended. And what happened to aid to Israel? Absolutely nothing. It continued at exactly the same level. Which showed that aid to Israel was not a function of American strategic calculations. It was overwhelmingly a function of the domestic political power of Israel’s lobby in the United States.

But the argument that Israel served US strategic interests was important to both Israel and its lobby. After the end of the Cold War, both needed a domain within which it could present itself as a crucial ally of the United States. Accordingly, during the global war on terror (GWOT), Israeli leaders said that their wars against Hezbollah or against the Palestinians in the West Bank were part of the US-led war on terror. But then the GWOT ended, and another domain was needed for Israel to present itself as America’s crucial ally.

Benjamin Netanyahu chose Iran to play the role of mortal enemy of both Israel and the United States, replacing the war on terror, which had replaced the Soviet Union. But Netanyahu actually had great difficulty fomenting the combined US-Israeli attack on Iran that he wanted.

Israel’s own security establishment opposed him, arguing that no, Iran was never going to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon. He also ran into a series of American presidents who all thought attacking Iran was a wacky idea. His demands for a war were successfully resisted until in Trump he found a president stupid enough — and a national security bureaucracy so drained of expertise and so incompetent — that he was able to essentially drag the United States into a war with Iran, a war which even Trump now probably thinks was a terrible mistake.

But there’s a deeper reason why Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, has been on the warpath against Iran, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon — and why lately he’s been ginning up a crisis with Turkey. The deep reason for such a bellicose posture is that his governments have been unable to articulate a vision of peace in the Middle East that anybody in the region would be satisfied with. And since they don’t have any vision of peace, they have to rely completely on their ability to use military force at almost no risk, whether that’s in Lebanon or Iraq or Syria or Gaza or Iran. The other day we saw the Israeli Air Force bomb a base in Syria — not because there was a threat, but because there was potentially a threat, from Turkey or from the Syrian military.

That is emblematic of the situation Israel has created for itself. If it can’t rely on diplomacy or negotiated compromises, it must rely on military force. But to rely on military force, it must be confident it can use that force without risk of significant casualties, or of escalation to the use of weapons of mass destruction. It therefore, in effect, insists on absolute air superiority and domination over the entire Middle East. And it has to insist that only it be permitted to have weapons of mass destruction. These are enormous demands. Remember, Iran is geographically bigger than Britain, France, and Germany combined.

The threat from Iran is not that it will attack Israel with nuclear weapons. It’s that if there’s even a 1 percent possibility that Iran could escalate to the nuclear level, Israel would no longer be able to use force in the region without fearing escalation. That’s intolerable if you have no plan for peace, which the Netanyahu government has never had. That’s the deeper reason he’s focused so much on Iran and relies so heavily on military force.

Ian Lustick

Yes. Originally, the lobby was only there to prevent pressure on Israel; it wasn’t out to change Israel, to make it into this fanatical right-wing state. But by insisting that aid to Israel be enormous in scope and unconditional in its delivery, the lobby made it essentially impossible, or at least extremely difficult, for moderate candidates to win elections in Israel. Because everything they said about what would happen if Israel alienated the United States — that it would pressure Israel into a deal worse than it could get if it adopted a reasonable position before that pressure — turned out to be false.

This is what happens to a country that has too much externally supplied political capital. If you were a politician in Israel, you learned that you had to pander to people’s fantasies and fears, and there was no real cost to it. But there was a tremendous cost to talking rationally about the predicament Israel would eventually find itself in.

I can list all these wonderful Israeli politicians — Shulamit Aloni, Haim Ramon, Yossi Sarid, Yossi Beilin — all of these people who could have been prime minister, and wanted to be prime minister but didn’t succeed, and couldn’t succeed, because of the lobby’s hammerlock on US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.

Ian Lustick

Yes. And that was specifically the problem with Joe Biden. He didn’t play the role the Israeli military always expects the United States to play.

When Time magazine interviewed me early in the Gaza war, they asked: When will the war end? I said, “I can tell you exactly when it will end. It’s the same as in every war. It will end when the United States tells Israel it has to end. Until that happens, the war will continue.” And Biden just wouldn’t say it. Trump more or less said it and it stopped (or at least, a certain version of war stopped). But it went on for years — far, far longer than it ever should have. It was ridiculous. The Israeli military never imagined that an American president would allow it to run so wild for so long.

Eli Clifton

One thing you see them doing is clinging, in a rather desperate, disingenuous way, to the fig leaf of a notion that the Israel they would like to be associated with somehow still exists, or is right around the corner. So if Netanyahu is removed, somehow this rightward shift will come to an end and Israel will go back to being like what it was, I guess, pre-1967.

When push comes to shove, politicians across the Democratic Party say: “I believe in a two-state solution.” And that’s a dangerous thing for them to be saying because it’s simply not rooted in any facts on the ground. The window has closed for that possibility, as desirable as it might have been.

So I think the way a lot of them are coping with it, to put it pretty bluntly, is through delusion, and through misrepresenting to their constituents what is possible and what the facts are on the ground.

Ian Lustick

Let me push that a little further. I published a book on this in 2019, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. Even then it had long since been impossible to imagine political scenarios by which a two-state solution could be achieved. Those stopped being produced in the 1990s when Oslo ended. But it’s been a safe political harbor to claim that a negotiated two-state arrangement is still possible.

It’s been safe for Israeli centrists who don’t want to admit they prefer apartheid to democracy. And it’s been safe for Democratic and other politicians in the United States, who are able to say: “I’m for a two-state solution. Don’t blame me, progressives.” And meanwhile they can also say to the lobby: “Don’t criticize me — even Netanyahu once said he was for a two-state solution.” As Eli said, it’s a fig leaf.

So where is the future? I would say you have to change the time frame of your analysis. Back when we used to think of a two-state solution as being plausible, we were thinking in what I call strategic time. Strategic time is like two to five years, the time frame when you actually might accomplish something in this kind of arena. We have to shift from strategic time to geological time. Geological time in politics is like thirty to sixty years.

How does a country like Israel democratize? It’s not the same as how Romania democratized: you shoot the dictator, and the next day, it’s a democracy. That’s not how democratization works in cases like, say, America when blacks were for generations excluded from politics, or Irish Catholics in Britain, or blacks in South Africa, or women in all western industrial democracies. That kind of democratization takes fifty to a hundred years.

Ian Lustick

It’s not going to happen tomorrow. But we should call the bluff of those in Israel who say they want to keep the territories Israel occupied in 1967. When you look at the West Bank annexation bills in the Knesset, none of them talk about immediate annexation of all the people and territory. They are actually afraid of really annexing the territories. They prefer to maintain the fiction that they have not already been permanently absorbed.

Ian Lustick

Maybe. But it won’t last.

Remember who Gadi Eisenkot is. Compared to Netanyahu, he may look like a reasonable guy who’s focused on reality and not fantasy, and not on pandering to the worst prejudices of his audience. But he’s also the progenitor of the “Dahiya doctrine.” That’s the doctrine named after a neighborhood in Beirut that Israel completely destroyed, not just to kill combatants but to destroy all the civilian infrastructure around them.

What we saw in Gaza was the application of that doctrine. So let’s not think too ambitiously about what Eisenkot has to offer.

I think the most interesting question about the upcoming election is whether Eisenkot will even be able to form a government without aligning himself with Arab-majority parties. The Ra’am party will now have a Jewish member of its Knesset slate, so it won’t be a pure Arab party anymore, but it still won’t be a “Zionist party” as Israelis define it. And the way Netanyahu frames it, only traitors would form a government with the support of non-Zionist parties. (Though of course, he himself tried to do that in the past).

But looking at it in terms of geological time, what interests me is the precedent of Arab-Jewish cooperation — even right-wing cooperation with Arabs — that presages the possibility that at some point in the future, significant numbers of Jews will see advantages for themselves in West Bank and Gaza Palestinians being able to vote. Will we have an election outcome where no one can form a government unless the coalition includes Arabs? And how will the Israeli political system react to that?

To me, that’s more important than the question of how long Eisenkot will be able to keep putting lipstick on the pig. I’m more interested in whether this election will force the country to move toward Jewish-Arab political alliances.

Eli Clifton

It’s very different. We’re no longer in a world where you have to debate whether or not the lobby exists. When you look at the pushback against Steve and John, that’s unfortunately where they had to fight a lot of their battles: it was about whether the lobby exists at all, and whether saying it exists is somehow antisemitic. And that’s no longer the world we’re in. It’s pretty well established.

I mean, I have this website I maintain — israelslobby.com — which tracks Federal Election Comission records on pro-Israel Super PACs in real time. Right now I think they’ve raised $160 million in this political cycle. That probably means they’re going to have raised $250 million just for these midterms. A quarter of a billion dollars — that’s a lot of money for a special interest for a foreign country to raise and spend. So the lobby objectively exists. That’s not something we have to debate anymore.

It’s also in the headlines. We’ve been fortunate with the timing of the book, because this is very much a part of the public debate right now, particularly with the Gaza war, the Iran war, and the midterms. It’s a top-of-mind issue for voters in a way that foreign policy issues generally aren’t. Of course, that’s also the downside: a lot of people are talking about this now. So we’re trying to bring something new to the table, to contextualize how we got to this moment.

This isn’t just a current affairs book. It’s looking at the historical record of how Israel’s lobby became what it is today and what that has meant, in terms of lost diplomatic opportunities for the United States, in terms of lost resources, but also in terms of the measurable domestic price of crackdowns on civil liberties, antisemitism witch hunts, efforts to curtail speech, particularly at universities. In that respect, this is a scarier moment than 2007.