Where the stench is biggest,
The biggest words are spoken.
If a man has to stop his nose
How is he to stop his ears?

—Bertolt Brecht, ‘On the News of the Tory Bloodbath in Greece’

Where the stench is biggest,
The biggest words are spoken.
If a man has to stop his nose
How is he to stop his ears?

To understand the unique position Israel occupies in American domestic politics, it is enough to compare the passions aroused by the successive wars over Palestine with those generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If the latter has been ubiquitous, attachment to it has for the most part been shallow and media-driven. To wit, the near complete collapse of interest in the fate of Kiev, on which the struggle between liberal democracy and autocracy was supposed to turn, after the Hamas attacks and Israeli onslaught in October directed all attention to the Middle East. If there has been no shortage of whipped-up emotion since, the share of genuine feeling—hatred, fear, indignation—is far higher, deriving from a century of Zionist colonization and regional resistance, overdetermined by imperial calculations. The extermination of Jews in Europe, and the expulsion of Arabs from their ancestral home in Palestine, are catastrophes that continue to reverberate among the respective kin of four continents.

As with the arms and territory that each side enjoys there, the material and ideological resources at their disposal in the West are staggeringly unequal. The us exemplifies this asymmetry. Here Israel can not only draw on deep reservoirs of emotion, but motivated electorates that span the two main parties and their standard geographic dispersions: from Jews to Christian Zionists; the synagogues of West Los Angeles to the mega churches of East Texas and Alabama. As a matter of electoral manoeuvre, the issue goes back to Truman, whose gradual move to back the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was based in part on Democratic prospects in 1946 and 1948, including fear of losing New York if he did not.footnote¹ The ‘Zionist lobby’ as it was then known has since grown beyond what any purely electoral calculus would warrant, to become one of the most vigilant influence operations in Washington.

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer first dissected its operations in 2006 in the aftermath of the us invasion of Iraq. Unable to publish ‘The Israel Lobby’ in a us outlet, they did so in the London Review of Books. In their analysis, the extraordinary level of military and diplomatic support given to Israel never reflected a rational strategic choice, still less solid consensus in society, but rather the ability to ‘prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing’, amidst wider indifference—since ‘candid discussion of us–Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy’. Enforcing this depended on three things: a steely grip on the legislature, leverage over the executive, and efforts across think tanks, universities and the media to shape public opinion. Twenty years on, what does the current turmoil reveal about the status of the Israel issue as it plays out in each of these realms?

Over Congress, the blanket of consensus is by one measure more suffocating. After 9/11, Bush Jr at first pressed Israel to halt Operation Defensive Shield, its invasion of the West Bank to crush the Second Intifada, as damaging to us interests in the Muslim world, where he sought out collaborators for the wider War on Terror. Congress responded with two resolutions backing Israel alongside an aid package, passed 94–2 in the Senate and 352–21 in the House. Twenty years later, in October 2023, a similar resolution passed the lower chamber by a larger margin, 412–10. The funding bill accompanying it also vastly exceeds the earlier offer: even if disbursements to Ukraine are stripped out by Republicans, and a humanitarian tuppence is thrown in for Gaza as a sop to softer hearts among the Democrats, it will no doubt pass to bipartisan cheers—sending $14 billion to Israel, on top of the $3.8 billion it has received annually since 2016 in a deal signed by Obama.

If anything, these figures understate the uniformity of opinion in Congress, while obscuring the distinct role of each party in foreclosing debate there. All but one of the holdouts to the October resolution were Democrats: if, against them, aipac has launched its usual fusillade—Jamaal Bowman and Ilhan Omar are set to face primary challengers—it has done so in cahoots with party leaders, who see it as their job to quash talk of a ceasefire emanating from these quarters. For defending protestors making this demand, and condemning Israel for the strike on Al-Ahli Hospital, Rashida Tlaib was censured for ‘promoting false narratives’ and ‘calling for the destruction of the state of Israel’. Republicans sponsored that motion, but 22 Democrats joined them to pass it—including the top recipients in New York of aipac money, Ritchie Torres and minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. The latter then joined hands with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the new Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, at the March for Israel on the Mall, against a backdrop of American and Israeli flags, to chants of ‘no ceasefire’ and ‘never again’.