When The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy was published in 2006, Washington was aghast at its assertion that Israel’s lobbying machine was a malign influence on US politics. Twenty years later, that argument might be met with a shrug.
This is partly a testament to the prescience of the book’s authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. At the time, criticizing the Israel lobby was considered to be a third rail in American politics, and the pressure to ignore or vilify the two writers was intense.
Fast-forward to 2026. Much has changed in the past two decades—major political shifts in the US and Israel, the ongoing collapse of Palestinian political representation, as well as upheaval in regional and global geopolitics. And the Israel lobby—particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—is on the ropes as never before.
Even so, it would be premature to conclude that the lobby’s power to distort US foreign policy is coming to an end. While the lobby’s machinations have been dragged out of the shadows during Israel’s war on Gaza, pro-Israel campaign funding in the United States is operating on a grander scale than ever (often promoting issues that are totally unrelated to Israel in order to obscure the intentions behind the lobby’s support for the candidates it favors). And while Democratic voters are turning away from Israel in unprecedented numbers, the lobby’s allies still maintain power at the party’s highest levels.
Which raises the question: Can the Israel lobby continue to win where it matters—in the White House and Congress—even as it rapidly loses popular legitimacy?
This is the consideration that underpins the new book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, which serves as a kind of spiritual sequel to Mearsheimer and Walt’s study. (Both men have endorsed the new book.) Its authors, Ian Lustick, a political-science professor and Israel-Palestine watcher, and Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist and cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, emphasize the outsize influence that Israel has exerted over US foreign policy, how that influence threatens American domestic freedoms, and how it is now being challenged. Assessing how the landscape has shifted in over 20 years, Lustick and Clifton highlight how contemporary political funding structures allow even greater access for unregulated money to flow from a small cadre of “plutocratic” pro-Israel megadonors alongside the expansion in aggressive techniques for quashing Israel’s critics—including legal pressure and attempts to co-opt campus disciplinary proceedings.
The frenzied spending and the intense resistance to change we have seen recently among Israel’s supporters are due in part to the precarious position in which the lobby currently finds itself. What might happen next can be summed up in three simple scenarios:
1. Despite all the tumult, the lobby maintains its grip on Washington, and the US continues to enable Israel’s destructive drive to displace the Palestinian people and dominate the region.
2. The jig is up: The United States stops genuflecting to Israel, and Israel is forced to figure out what it can get away with (answer: far less) in this new landscape.
3. The debate around the Israel lobby and its impact is superseded by the bigger story of the United States’ declining influence in the Middle East.
It is worth unpacking how each of these scenarios might play out.
Despite some high-profile and even spectacular losses for the lobby—most notably its failure to stop a string of pro-Palestinian Democrats from winning primary races—its staying power should not be underestimated. Which brings us to our first scenario: that the lobby comes up with a way out of its current predicament.
Given that Israel and its leaders appear to take pride in their extremism, cruelty, and callousness, it should come as little surprise that their echo chamber in the US is struggling to make popular arguments and to win debates.
But the lobby doesn’t necessarily need the masses on its side if it can maintain its dominance in elite spaces—and in some ways, it has more tools to do so than ever before. Lustick and Clifton rightly cite the significance of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened the door to “independent” campaign expenditures, enabling AIPAC and its allies to intensify their interventions in political campaigns throughout the country in the past few years.
All that money doesn’t guarantee victory, but it can still sway elections and act as a deterrent to potential candidates. The 2026 Republican primary in Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District is a case in point: The incumbent, Thomas Massie, a prominent critic of Israel, found himself facing the most expensive House primary in US history, thanks overwhelmingly to the funding against him from pro-Israel PACs. Massie was successfully defeated.
While this phenomenon is certainly not unique to the Israel lobby, the scale of money involved is exceptional, and the lobby often goes to great lengths to obscure its fingerprints by using front organizations. Add to this the exponential growth in the wealth of the billionaire class under the Trumpian regime of deregulation and corruption. Consider, for instance, how the eye-watering gains that tech moguls are accruing in the current IPO mania may funnel more money into the coffers of pro-Israel campaign financing.
The lobby is also attempting to show how adaptable it is by overhauling the material, strategic, and moral cases (what Mearsheimer and Walt referred to as the three “pillars”) at the core of its argument for unstinting US support for Israel. The pro-Israel narrative is being questioned in each of these three cases.
The material case—that Israel requires endless military assistance from the United States—has become the most difficult to defend. Why should American taxpayers be forced to be complicit in the genocide in Gaza, especially while funding for US domestic programs is being slashed?
Israel has cleverly attempted to preempt that argument. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in Congress are trying to pull off a bait-and-switch: an offer to taper off the use of conventional military aid and instead embed Israel’s defense and tech industries more deeply within the US military-industrial complex. Under this new configuration, the United States would still subsidize the Israeli military, but it would be able to dodge scrutiny by replacing a visible aid check with spending that could match or exceed the previous levels.
Making the case that this alliance is both strategically vital to American interests and morally aligned with US values is more complicated. It’s being attempted in two key ways. The first is the development of a radical political vision: incorporating Zionism as a touchstone of contemporary far-right Western politics and looking at Israel’s ethnonationalism as an ideal type to be replicated elsewhere, including in the US.
The second way involves the weaponization of antisemitism by recklessly using it as a cudgel to criminalize and shut down debate. In particular, the Israeli government and its allies in the lobby have attempted to redefine criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitic and thus out of step with American values. As a form of Israeli statecraft, it absolutely makes sense to stipulate that key critiques of Israeli policy and of Zionism should be redefined as antisemitic. As a method of silencing Israel’s critics, this tactic has been effective. As a way of actually combating antisemitism, it has been wholly counterproductive.
Finally, as Israel draws more scrutiny from legal institutions like the International Court of Justice (which is hearing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel) and the International Criminal Court (which is pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials), the United States has not only continued to ignore the ICJ’s rulings but has moved to attack the ICC. The US sanctioned nine ICC judges and the court’s chief prosecutor, freezing their assets and restricting their travel, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently committed the US government to “dismantl[ing] the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”
Clearly, then, the lobby is not about to roll over, and it could continue to hold considerable ground. But what if all these efforts fail to stem the tides of change—especially since the tactics described above, which have been successful until recently, are now generating more backlash than allegiance? This brings us to the second scenario: that of a genuine decline in the power of the Israel lobby.
To put it mildly, the lobby’s defense of the status quo is not one that can sustain widespread bipartisan support. Though its opponents might struggle to establish a broad consensus around a settler-colonial critique of Zionism, there is a widely shared public disgust at Israel’s inhumane actions and at the US government’s military, financial, and diplomatic support for them. One does not have to be a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America to recoil at the decades of occupation, the killing and starvation in Gaza, the relentless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank, or Israel’s desire to wage perpetual war against its neighbors with the backing (and the bombs) of the US.
If Israeli voters oust Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in this fall’s elections, then pro-Israel propaganda in the United States might experience a new blossoming. But a post-Bibi honeymoon, if it arrives, may be short-lived, given that Israel’s anti-Netanyahu bloc is still committed to maintaining apartheid and rejects any reasonable compromise with the Palestinians. As opinion polls reflect, Americans’ attitudes are hardening toward Israeli policy as a whole, irrespective of which leaders are in charge.
The Israel lobby’s problems look even more foreboding when one goes deeper into what is happening in the two most critical bastions of support for Israel in the US: the Jewish and evangelical communities.
Whether out of shock at Israel’s conduct in Gaza or disgust with the lobby’s cynical weaponization of antisemitism, many American Jews are beginning to turn against what Israel stands for—eroding in the process a key element of the political architecture that sustains US acquiescence to Israel’s policy agenda. A Washington Post–Ipsos survey last year found that 61 percent of American Jews believed that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, and polling now shows that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a staunch critic of Israeli policy, is more popular among American Jews than the prime minister of Israel.
Perhaps even more crucial are signs of declining support among evangelical Christians, especially in the community’s younger members. As the journalist John Judis has argued, the popularity of end-times prophecy is fading in favor of a justice-focused theology as a framework for engaging with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Inside the MAGA movement, the antagonism between the America First and Israel First wings has intensified. On June 18, Vice President JD Vance admonished Israel on a New York Times podcast: “You’re a country of 9 million people, you just can’t kill your way out of solving every single national-security problem.” On his own popular podcast, Tucker Carlson regularly excoriates Israel Firsters to a receptive audience.
There’s even more of a groundswell on the Democratic side. In response to this shifting terrain, some Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel, are cynically changing their rhetoric about Israel without changing their policy commitments. If Democratic voters are mollified by these moves, the lobby will breathe a sigh of relief. But there is little evidence that is happening. Mamdani, the most compelling politician of his generation, has shown how to change the terms of debate while maintaining the support of a significant portion of the Jewish community.
That the most prominent defenders of Israel are assuming an ever-more-grotesque quality, and showing less and less of an interest in broadening their appeal, only adds to this changing reality. Witness, for instance, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s launching a so-called Mamdani Monitor “for Israel” or Commentary editor John Podhoretz’s celebrating the role of “Jewish money” in Thomas Massie’s defeat.
The war against Iran may one day be regarded as a watershed moment. It is widely held that Israel played a major role in pushing the United States into the conflict, which has been a disaster for US interests. This has led many observers to begin grappling with the ways in which US and Israeli interests diverge, a reckoning that is likely to intensify over time.
Which brings us to our third scenario.
Perhaps the greater challenge that Israel faces is not the decline in its standing in the US, but rather the decline of the US itself. We no longer live in a world of American primacy, even if much of Washington is unwilling to acknowledge that fact. The catastrophic US-Israeli wars in the Middle East and West Asia are only accelerating that decline.
This could prove to be a vicious cycle: The further Israel hurtles down the path of regional overreach, the more dependent on the US and the less popular with the American public it becomes; and the more the United States is pulled into such wars, the weaker its own geopolitical position becomes.
Is it reasonable to speculate that Israel is preparing for a future in which the United States is no longer the world’s dominant power? If so, that might explain why Israel was willing to risk pursuing the Iran war.
The evidence is mounting that the Greater Israel project is recklessly overambitious. Israel is attempting to use US power (while it is still available) to establish an unassailable position of regional dominance, one that would make Israel less reliant on the United States. Netanyahu has spoken, for instance, of a “hexagon” of alliances centered on Israel, including countries in the Horn of Africa, South Asia (India), the southeastern Mediterranean, and the Gulf.
It’s unlikely that Israel can achieve this ambition. It is now viewed by most of the states in the region as a radical threat to stability. The extent of popular anger at Israel’s cruelty in Gaza has forced many of the leaders of those states, who were previously inclined to strengthen their ties with Israel, to sit up and take notice.
While it’s premature to conclude that a new regional bloc will emerge as a counter to both the Israeli- and Iranian-led axes, the pieces are beginning to be put in place. One notable development is the creation of a “Quad”—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan—that has been coordinating at a high level. For these countries and others, the Iran war has demonstrated the perils of relying on a United States that can be so easily swayed by Israeli hubris. In other words, it may be that regional dynamics could ultimately lead to a more concerted and effective effort to contain and deter Israeli expansionism. Simultaneously, the Israeli attempt to deal a definitive defeat to its enemies has backfired.
Even Israel’s military edge and the success of its armaments industry may come under challenge—whether or not the current effort to further integrate the Israeli and US military succeeds. As an arms developer and exporter, Israel will face stiffer competition from South Korea, the rapidly revamping European military-industrial complex, and the burgeoning Ukrainian arms industry once that country’s war with Russia ebbs. Meanwhile, non-Western-aligned states will be able to draw more on supplies from the vastly expanded Russian arms industry and on increasingly effective Chinese military exports.
The conditions are more favorable than ever for curtailing the impact of the Israel lobby, both inside the United States and in the Middle East. The lobby is being called on to deliver more just as it is facing unprecedented challenges to its effectiveness.
It is a major achievement to have reached this moment, albeit at an astronomical cost to so many. Much will depend on how the next phase is navigated—by political movements inside the US; by regional actors, including multiple Palestinian factions; and by Israel and its supporters.
If Israeli Jews are to be compelled to reevaluate the expansionist and radical guiding ideology of their state, then there is still much work to do. Walt and Mearsheimer, and now Lustick and Clifton, have helped demystify how the Israel lobby works in the United States. If the US has indeed entered an era of genuine potential for change, including challenging Israeli impunity, then the need for a Palestinian movement to assume the mantle of strategic leadership and for an Israeli counterpart capable of thinking beyond zero-sum destruction is more acute than ever.
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