The Israel Lobby Is Out of Control
▻https://jacobin.com/2026/09/israel-lobby-aipac-netanyahu-iran
SETH ACKERMAN
Almost twenty years ago, the international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote a very famous and very controversial book called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Your book is in many ways a sequel to theirs. What made you decide the time was right for a book like this?
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.