In a presidential election where policy toward Israel is arguably more important than it has ever been before, we are seeing a clear demonstration of the limits of the influence of the pro-Israel lobby.
For Kamala Harris, her support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its rampaging through the West Bank, its devastation of Lebanon, its deliberate provocations of Iran, and its general effort to destabilize the Middle East and possibly spark a regional war have been net negatives.
Some of this might be argued to be out of her hands. She does not make foreign policy; she can only advise about it. The President, Joe Biden, makes the decision and it is well known that he has spurned advice from many who have his ear to back Israel regardless of the incredible magnitude of its crimes. Indeed, reports have been leaked that Harris has been among those trying to persuade Biden to do more for the people of Gaza.
But that argument has become less and less convincing as Harris’ campaign has moved to the right, repeatedly and aggressively insulted Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Americans, and consistently fought against any perception that she has any disagreements with Biden on this issue at all.
For his part, Donald Trump accepted a huge donation from Miriam Adelson with the stipulation that he back Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. He has called for Israel to accelerate the genocide in Gaza to “finish the job” there. Trump’s appeal to his Christian Nationalist/Christian Zionist base is clear. Unlike Harris, he has faced no calls from his constituency to change his policy at all.
Speaking for myself, I live in a solid blue state, so I will vote for neither of these candidates, and Harris will win my state anyway. But those who live in swing states deserve a better choice than having to decide between a facilitator of genocide who promises more of the same and a fascist wannabe dictator whose incompetence only magnifies the dangers of his autocratic tendencies.
It’s clear enough why Trump pursues the policies in Israel and Palestine that he does. But Harris is endangering her campaign with her contempt for Palestinian life, her indifference to the suffering, and her refusal to even hint that she might behave any differently from her genocidal boss.
There are those who believe that the cause of this is the “Israel Lobby.” This debate over the impact and role of the lobby has been raging for decades. It touches on questions of the policymaking process, which is opaque for most, what influence powerful lobbying groups have, and how that influence manifests.
AIPAC, the main figure in the pro-Israel lobby, is one of the most effective and impactful lobbies in Washington, certainly in the field of foreign policy. But this is a case where that answer just doesn’t fit at all, and it’s worth examining why that is the case.
Understanding the role AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups play in this unique policy sphere is crucial. There are those who vastly understate or underestimate the power of this lobby. Sometimes that’s due to naiveté, sometimes to ignorance, and other times it is an intentional tactic to bolster spurious accusations of conspiracy theories and antisemitism.
There are others who overstate the power of the Lobby, sometimes because they buy into conspiratorial thinking and other times because it is the only explanation they can conceive of to explain a policy that they perceive as being uniquely out of step with American interests.
Examining these questions is crucial. It is uncontroversial to state that America’s policy toward Israel is highly problematic. Israel’s supporters contend that the complications that support for Israel cause for the United States are due to antisemitism and are outweighed by the benefits of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Detractors of that special relationship, including myself, argue that the benefits are overstated and many of the perceived positives are relics of outdated views of the Middle East and of the United States’ global interests, while U.S. support for Israel makes an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people, and the regional tumult it causes, impossible.
Unraveling this is crucial, since one thing most everyone agrees on is that the current policy is unsatisfactory. Pro-Israel forces are often unhappy with the restraints they perceive on Israel’s actions from Washington. Supporters of Palestinian rights need only point to the conditions for Palestinians to demonstrate why they see U.S. policy as a disaster. But we must understand the problem if we are to devise useful strategies to confront and resolve it.
Is American Middle East policy so far out of step with its other foreign policies?
The history of the United States, both recent and more distant, clearly demonstrates that it needs no lobbying force to pursue horrific, genocidal policies. This country was built on genocide and the most brutal form of slavery, crimes which, to this day, we have refused to make amends for.
More recently, we can look at Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Niger, Somalia, Lebanon, and many other examples. The devastation of the globe by American violence far surpasses the record of any other country in history, despite our relatively youthful age as a state. So, first, let’s dispense with any notion that if AIPAC and its ilk didn’t exist, we would have a good or benign policy toward Palestine.
But if we’re trying to imagine what it would look like if we simply removed the Israel Lobby from the scene, we are not imagining wholly without evidence. AIPAC and the Lobby in general was not particularly influential before the late 1970s. Short-sighted and nationalistic elements within the Jewish community mobilized in support of Israel and Zionism from the earliest days of the Zionist movement. But no one could seriously contend that it had anything like the influence it wields today.
Christian Zionism, though it too existed since the 19th century in some form, did not coalesce as a significant political force in the United States until the 1980s. Yet the Truman administration got behind Zionism and Israel very quickly after World War II, despite serious reservations from some of its top diplomats. There was, undoubtedly, debate over Israel and what our policy should be through the 1960s.
But after the 1967 war, the U.S., which already looked favorably upon Israel as a Cold War asset, became more interested in Israel as a client state. The strategy of the day was to try to unite the non-Arab Mideast countries—Iran, Türkiye, and Israel—as a sort of vanguard protecting the West’s interests (and the dictatorships) in the oil-producing Arab states and opposing both Soviet influence and Pan-Arab nationalism.
All of this was based on geo-strategic thinking, and had nothing to do with any pro-Israel lobbying, although the Lobby was becoming stronger by 1967. Throughout the 1970s, and with the encouragement of pro-Israel forces in the White House and some in Congress (Henry Kissinger was obviously a key player in the former, and people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan were leaders in Congress), the Lobby grew in influence and, crucially, in terms of its access to key political figures.
Where the Lobby has power and where it doesn’t
AIPAC, Christians United for Israel, other political actions committees, and various nonprofits, like pro-Palestinian rights advocates, have two places where they can exercise influence: elections and the public discourse.
It would be a mistake to believe that electoral politics and public opinion do not impact policymakers in the Executive Branch, led by the President. But it would be equally incorrect to assert that they have the kind of influence in those meeting rooms that they have in Congress. It simply isn’t the case.
I won’t run the whole argument here, but I would refer you to a piece I wrote in 2014, for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), The Cold Realities of US Policy in Israel-Palestine. That piece explains how geo-strategic concerns, and for the U.S., imperial concerns, dominate foreign policymaking.
What I can say here is that I’ve spoken with many people who have been involved in policymaking in the White House, State Department, and Defense Department during my more than two decades of work in foreign policy. That has included ambassadors, top advisers to the President, and other high-ranking officials, as well as many of their staffers.
They have uniformly told me that domestic politics play a crucial role in the discussions about policy. Indeed, many have said that domestic politics is where those deliberations would begin every day. But from there, they would go on to include strategic planning and tactical discussions. Where Israel was concerned, domestic politics played a bigger role, but ultimately, it was always the perception of national interests that determined key decisions, with domestic concerns being one part of that conception of “national interests.”
What makes Israel particularly unusual is the laws that have been passed by Congress about it. For many years, AIPAC’s great strength was that it was virtually unmatched in terms of producing legislative strategy. It would get bills passed that seemed meaningless or performative at the time, but would take on enormous significance later. An example of this is the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which had no real world consequences due to a presidential waiver in it. That waiver became so routine over the years it was almost forgotten about…until Donald Trump decided not to exercise the waiver in 2018. And so, the U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem.
Another law that AIPAC was able to get passed, not so long ago, continues to have an enormous impact. In 2008, the Arms Export Control Act was amended to require that the President ensure that Israel is sufficiently equipped “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors.”
That law means that Israel must always have a “qualitative military edge (QME)” over all the Middle East countries put together and that any American aid or arms sales to other countries in the region cannot bring Israel’s QME under that level.
It’s a stunning piece of legislation. In theory, if the U.S. decided to withhold arms to Israel, as so many of us are urging, it could bring the President into conflict with this law. That sort of conundrum is something presidents and congresses tend to do all they can to avoid, which, by default, insulates aid to Israel even further than it already was before long-held policy was codified into law by this amendment.
Ensuring Israel’s QME as a matter of law was a big deal, and it demonstrates how Congress can force the President into certain policy decisions. To date, there is no evidence that any president really needed to be forced like that, even those like Barack Obama or George H.W. Bush who had less than warm relationships to Israel.
But the law limits the president’s options, and it means that even a successful advocacy campaign to stop or even pause arms shipments to Israel would then have to resolve the conflict between the laws that campaign would rely on (compliance with international law and human rights norms), which are part of the Arms Export Control Act, and this amendment which is another part of the very same Act.
And, of course, Presidents have to be sensitive to public opinion, which for years was highly distorted by pro-Israel forces that made it difficult for people who were not ready to put in some effort to hear Palestinian narratives and voices. The result was that most Americans had a severely slanted view of the question of Palestine and Israel, and public discourse reflected this. IN recent years, hard work by Palestine advocates and the greater accessibility of information has started to change this, but the work is far from done.
Ultimately, however, presidents have a lot of power. Barack Obama decided he wanted to forge the Iran nuclear deal in 2014, and, a year later, he succeeded. AIPAC fought a bitter battle against it, and Republicans were only too eager to work to undermine what would be Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement.
But in the end, despite what was perhaps the fiercest struggle by advocacy groups against a plank of a president’s foreign policy in history, the power of the White House was too much, and Obama was able to get the deal done, and he did it despite both houses of Congress being controlled by the Republicans.
Presidents can do that, and anyone who thinks that Joe Biden is somehow faced with an insurmountable adversary in AIPAC and that is why he is supporting a genocide is deeply mistaken. His support of genocide is a choice, one he makes every day. The President of the United States is not helpless before any lobbying or advocacy group, much less one like AIPAC, whose resources, though considerable, are hardly comparable to some of the really big political action committees.
Biden’s lock-step support for Israel’s genocide has nothing to do with the Lobby
Ultimately, AIPAC and the other pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups have one weapon to use in Washington: elections. All the money, the ads, the media activism all come down to winning or losing elections. That is the most obvious place that the Lobby theory regarding Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza goes off the rails.
I see many comments about Biden being an “AIPAC shill” or “afraid to go up against AIPAC.” It makes no sense in this case. Harris is losing votes because of her stance on Gaza, and polls that have looked into this have shown she’d get a bump if she took a stand against Israel and for an end to the genocide. Much of the momentum that was already building before Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump was because of his policy on Gaza.
If it’s at that point, what can AIPAC possibly threaten Biden or Harris with? AIPAC does not have unlimited resources, and it spent huge, absolutely unprecedented amounts to defeat Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both of whom were courageous people who often took principled stances with little regard for electoral consequences. As such, they were in vulnerable political positions that AIPAC still had to spend enormous amounts of money to take advantage of.
Harris is no such person. She, like Biden, is a politician through and through and does not go out on limbs. They stay safe, or at least they follow the path they perceive as safer, when political considerations are all they need to worry about.
For Biden, as is well known, he needs no AIPAC to make him a blind supporter of Israel. This is a man whose hatred of Palestinians runs so deep it even once shocked no less a person than Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Biden is not just a Zionist, as he takes great pains to remind everyone at every opportunity. He is a believer in the bloodiest kind of Zionism, and his policy reflects that. Being a Democrat, he knows, or at least is regularly reminded by his advisers, that he must express sympathy for Palestinian suffering in some way and say that Israel must operate within the law, but his actions—not only his arming of Israel, but his parroting of Israeli propaganda from day one—make his views quite clear.
Harris has refused to distance herself, but she is not the ideologue with a romanticized view of Israel that Biden is. As I’ve repeatedly said, I expect Harris will back off from Biden’s radical approach to Israel and take up one that is more traditionally Democratic. That means, of course, still heavily biased in favor of Israel and still largely indifferent to Palestinian suffering, but I do not think she will be as well disposed to Israel’s wildly destabilizing behavior as Biden is. It’s important to keep Biden in perspective: no president has ever been this indulgent of Israel. Biden is, even for American Presidents, quite radical in this regard.
All that said, Harris, when she was in the Senate, had a warm relationship with AIPAC, and her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a notable figure in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities. Emhoff’s reputation is that of a liberal Zionist someone not very inclined toward Netanyahu and the Israeli right. But it would be quite a surprise of his sympathies for Israel were not shared to some degree by his spouse, especially given her generally pro-Israel record even before becoming vice president.
All of that suggests to me that Harris will be awful on Palestine, but she will be awful like any mainstream Democrat, not as radical as Biden has been. I can’t prove that Harris will be any better at all than Biden, and Harris has gone out of her way to alienate, aggravate, and chase away supporters of Palestine, Muslim- and Arab-Americans, and progressive voters at every turn. She has not disguised her contempt for Palestinians and their supporters, despite some empty rhetoric to the contrary. So even my extremely low expectations of her may be too optimistic.
Why has Harris done this? Again, not because of AIPAC. Pro-Israel money has been basically split between her and Trump, and Harris has plenty of major pro-Israel individual donors. In any case, for all the stories about pro-Israel money in elections, many other industries give far more (the numbers on this list FAR outpace pro-Israel giving).
It’s not easy to answer the question of why Harris has chosen the course she has. Several possibilities present themselves. She is clearly getting horrible advice from the usual cadre of “political strategists” that have done so much damage to the Democrats in recent years. She may simply be falling back into the traditional Democratic, pro-Israel position, seeing support for Israel as a plus and any mention of Palestinians as a step backward. Given that she has been torpedoing her own campaign by shunning progressives and embracing the worst kinds of conservatives (the Cheneys, for instance), Harris’ campaign looks an awful lot like the one Hillary Clinton ran in 2016, and, given the whining excuses establishment Democrats have endlessly made about that election, she may believe that doing so is a winning strategy (spoiler alert: it’s not).
But it’s not because of AIPAC, or at least not only so. To be sure, Harris has to be careful. While it’s probably too late in the game for AIPAC to do her much harm in this race, they can still do damage to Democrats in upcoming elections, and they might do so if Harris threatened arms shipments to Israel, which is AIPAC’s Big Red Line. Still, when we consider how much it took for them to defeat relatively weak members of the House like Bowman and Bush (much as I love them both, neither of their seats were safe even without AIPAC), we can see clearly that it would take a much greater level of funding than they have ever had before to really damage an incumbent president, should Harris have such a concern.
But while calling for Israel to be held to the standards of U.S. law regarding human rights and adherence to international law if they want American military aid would be bold (though, I would argue, it would actually be successful both in political and policy terms, even though it is certainly a huge gamble), there was virtually no risk in allowing a Palestinian-American state legislator to speak at the Democratic National Convention this summer, or to express in more forceful terms that she wants Israel to agree to a ceasefire, calling out Netanyahu as the obstacle that everyone, including Israel’s supporters, know he is.
There are many things she could have done. Some she might have eschewed because it would have meant standing in opposition to Biden, something no VP running for the presidency wants to do. But others simply show that her primary concern is what she sees as the United States’ imperial interests.
Whatever the explanation, the idea that the Israel Lobby is the main reason simply doesn’t fit the facts. They are among the most influential lobbies in Washington, on par with any lobbying group. And in terms of foreign policy no other actor comes close. But in the end, they have power in specific areas, and can only go so far in determining policy. It doesn’t do to underestimate the Israel Lobby. But exaggerating its power actually makes it more influential, since a great deal of their power depends on how powerful they are perceived to be, rightly or wrongly.
When perception is reality, it is important to try to be as realistic as possible. Whatever is motivating Harris’ self-immolating strategy, it’s not a Lobby.