AIPAC, Washington's lobby and the price of dissent

AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is credited with the power to decide Washington’s policy towards Israel, and that power is measured today in tens of millions of dollars spent against specific members of Congress. The archives and the historiography tell a more uncomfortable story, both for those who explain everything by lobbying and for those who deny it. The alliance was built by presidents, for Cold War reasons, before the apparatus that now protects it existed. What lobbying added, and what changed in 2021, is the price a politician pays for straying from the line. This episode reconstructs that price, its limits and the reasons why the mixed results of the past year make it debatable.

Kenen’s office and the question the Senate left open

The organisation now called AIPAC began as the pressure arm of the American Zionist Council, a federation of American Zionist bodies, and its executive director was Isaiah Kenen. Sources differ on the year in which that arm took shape, between 1951 and 1954 depending on the text consulted, and this account follows Kobby Barda, who in Modern Judaism (2026), drawing on the papers of Philip Bernstein held at the University of Rochester, places the decision in March 1954.

An organisation that received money, even indirectly, from the Jewish Agency, the body that represented the world Zionist movement, raised a legal question from the outset.

The question has a name, the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, a law that requires anyone acting in the United States on behalf of a foreign principal to register. On 2 August 1963, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by J. William Fulbright, examined whether the payments from the Jewish Agency to the Council, which Barda puts at 1.5 million dollars between 1955 and 1962, obliged Kenen’s organisation to register. An agency official acknowledged before the committee that it paid for Council subscriptions, intended to distribute material. There was no sanction. AIPAC went on operating as a domestic lobbying group, without registering as a foreign agent.

The interpretation of those payments remains disputed. Grant F. Smith, to whom we owe the declassification of the hearing’s minutes, argues that AIPAC operates outside the legal framework of FARA. Barda acknowledges that merit and contests, however, that the Near East Report bulletin served as a cover for laundering foreign money. He cites Kenen’s testimony, according to which the Council’s purchases never exceeded 23 per cent of copies, and concludes that the bulletin was a commercial product. The question the hearing left open resurfaces four decades later from the pen of Mearsheimer and Walt and remains current, namely how far an organisation accused of defending the interests of another state can present itself as a domestic lobby.

An alliance born before the lobby

The figure that opens almost every debate on AIPAC is aid, and its curve deserves examination before any cause is attributed to it. According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress’s analytical service, between 1949 and 1965 Israel received on average some 63 million dollars a year, more than 95 per cent of it in economic development and food aid. It was the aid of a small, isolated country, not that of a strategic ally.

The change comes in the 1960s, and Douglas Little reconstructed it in 1993 from declassified documents in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. In August 1962 Kennedy offered Ben-Gurion the Hawk anti-aircraft missiles in exchange for Israel’s acceptance of the Johnson plan on Palestinian refugees, and the sale was concluded in September. On 23 March 1966, 48 A-4 Skyhawk aircraft were authorised for 72.1 million dollars, slower than the F-4 Phantoms Israel had requested. The Phantoms were granted only on 25 November 1968, on condition that Israel renew its commitment not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Little argues that for Johnson, as for his two predecessors, fighting wars of national liberation and preventing nuclear proliferation weighed at least as much as winning elections, and recalls that in May 1964 he had decided that geopolitics should prevail, for the moment, over domestic politics. A president who makes the sale of aircraft conditional on a commitment about the buyer’s nuclear programme does not behave like a hostage.

If the aid of the 1960s was decided in the White House and the Pentagon, the pertinent question is not whether the apparatus created the alliance, but at what point it passed from spectator to guarantor of it.

After the October war of 1973 the curve breaks.

According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress approved 2.2 billion dollars in emergency aid for Israel after the October 1973 war, of which 1.5 billion was in military grants, the largest package of grant aid given to Israel until then, and the remaining 700 million took the form of a loan.

From then on the volume accumulates without interruption. The same service counts 174.965 billion current dollars from 1949 to fiscal year 2025, and the memorandum signed on 14 September 2016 sets 38 billion for fiscal years 2019 to 2028. None of these stages was decided with today’s electoral apparatus, which did not exist. All of them required, however, a Congress willing to vote them through, and there lobbying does intervene, since aid is negotiated in the executive and carried out by a legislative vote.

Three tests of strength, three different outcomes

On 28 October 1981, the Senate approved by 52 votes to 48 the sale of AWACS early-warning aircraft to Saudi Arabia, which AIPAC and other Jewish organisations had opposed forcefully in public. David Tal, who worked in Israeli archives and at the Reagan Library (Diplomatic History, 2023), shows that Reagan received 45 senators and persuaded 19 of them to change position, among them Roger Jepsen, who had opposed the sale. He also shows, against the consensus of the historiography, that Israel did not try to block it and that the Begin government used it as a bargaining chip, denouncing it in public while negotiating compensation in private, including additional F-15 and F-16 aircraft, access to satellite information and better credit terms. Lobbying lost the vote, and according to Tal Israel obtained more military aid and greater strategic cooperation.

In September 1991, George H. W. Bush asked Congress to postpone for 120 days its consideration of 10 billion dollars in loan guarantees for Israel, arguing that the White House needed room for the Madrid peace conference, and warned that he would use his veto if necessary. On 12 September he explained himself to the press.

I heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it. (George H. W. Bush, press conference of 12 September 1991)

The guarantees were announced on 11 August 1992 at Kennebunkport, after Yitzhak Rabin won the Israeli elections in June and promised to freeze new construction in the settlements of the West Bank and Gaza, a condition Washington had set (UPI). Bush lost the November 1992 election, and to attribute that defeat to this contest is an inference that no document consulted for this episode supports.

That leaves 2015. The opposition to the nuclear agreement with Iran was, according to Elizabeth Drew (The New York Review of Books, 22 October 2015), a campaign by AIPAC and allied organisations whose spending is reported to have reached as much as 40 million dollars, although some estimates are lower. According to Drew, until that battle AIPAC had acted as a bipartisan organisation, and by opposing the agreement vehemently it became an ally of the Republicans in a highly partisan fight. On 10 September, the vote to close debate on the resolution of disapproval, which required 60 votes, drew 58 in favour and 42 against, and failed. The agreement survived congressional review, and Drew argues that Netanyahu’s intrusion into American partisan politics backfired on its promoters.

One test lost but exploited by the Israeli government, another postponed and conditioned, another lost without mitigating circumstances. None fits the formula of a lobby that always gets what it wants, and all three fit that of an organisation that raises the cost of contradiction.

The difference matters for method. Measuring the power of a pressure group by its votes leads to error, because defeats leave a trace in the record, whereas what a lobby achieves in silence, by preventing a proposal from ever reaching a vote, appears in no register.

From the office to the ballot box, and what the ballot box returned

Until 2021, AIPAC had never donated directly to federal candidates, according to Sludge. It lobbied those who voted, and the financing of campaigns was left to other donors and committees. That year it changed method. It set up AIPAC PAC on 15 December 2021, a political action committee that can give no more than 5,000 dollars per candidate per election, and on 3 January 2022 it registered the United Democracy Project, a super PAC, that is a committee that cannot donate to candidates but can raise and spend unlimited sums on its own, formally independent of the campaigns (FactCheck.org). The scale can be read in the records of the Federal Election Commission, the FEC. Between 1 January 2025 and 31 July 2026, the United Democracy Project reported receipts of 107,542,702 dollars, independent expenditures of 50,927,163 and a reserve of 59.1 million in cash. According to FactCheck.org, its fundraising had already exceeded in June, at about 104 million, the total for the whole 2024 cycle, 87.1 million. In the 2024 cycle it spent close to 9.9 million against Jamaal Bowman and more than 5.2 million against Cori Bush, and both lost. FactCheck does not attribute those defeats to the money, and this episode will not either, because a primary admits too many causes.

The 2026 cycle offers a more ambiguous record. In Kentucky, the Republican primary of 19 May pitted Congressman Thomas Massie, a critic of aid to Israel, against Ed Gallrein, the candidate backed by Trump. Some 37 million dollars were spent, a record for a House primary according to Louisville Public Media, and Massie lost by ten points. The United Democracy Project put in 4.1 million, mostly in attack advertisements against Massie, and MAGA KY, a committee formed by Trump campaign advisers that attacked the congressman for almost a year, 7.4 million.

To attribute Massie’s fall to AIPAC alone, with the president backing his rival and his advisers financing the attacks, would be to confuse a coincidence of interests with a cause.

In Michigan, on 4 August, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary against Haley Stevens by a margin of about one point, according to Al Jazeera. The United Democracy Project had invested 30.6 million in favour of Stevens and against El-Sayed according to Sludge, the largest sum it has devoted to a single contest, and according to Al Jazeera El-Sayed prevailed against more than 60 million in spending, mostly from pro-Israel groups. In New Jersey’s 11th district it spent more than two million against Tom Malinowski in the special primary of 5 February, and Analilia Mejia won, a result that spending was not meant to favour, since according to NBC News it split the moderate vote.

A less visible mechanism also exists. According to FactCheck.org (2026), the United Democracy Project channelled more than 40 per cent of its primary spending in both parties during the 2026 cycle through short-lived committees and pass-through committees, which make its trail hard to follow. The published totals do not match either, because they measure different things. Sludge counts 104.3 million in spending by the PAC and the super PAC together in the 2026 cycle, and the FEC records 77 million in disbursements by the latter between January 2025 and July 2026. Neither figure includes allied committees that do not depend on AIPAC, such as Democratic Majority for Israel. The money arrives, finally, before an electorate that is shifting, and a legislator who calculates his risk reads both the money and the polls. In February 2026, Gallup found that 41 per cent of Americans sympathised more with the Palestinians and 36 per cent with the Israelis, a difference without statistical significance, but one that a year earlier had stood at 46 per cent to 33 per cent in favour of the Israelis. Among Democrats, 65 per cent leaned towards the Palestinians and 17 per cent towards the Israelis. Among Republicans, 70 per cent towards the Israelis and 13 per cent towards the Palestinians.

What historians dispute, and what no archive can settle

The thesis that placed lobbying at the centre of public debate was formulated by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books of 23 March 2006. They define the Lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and organisations that actively work to steer American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction, make clear that it is not a unified movement with a central leadership nor a conspiracy of the kind depicted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and argue that neither Israel’s strategic value during the Cold War nor the moral imperative tied to the persecution of the Jews suffices to explain the level of support. Of AIPAC they write that it is “a de facto agent for a foreign government” with “a stranglehold on Congress”, and add that its members are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.

The most solid replies do not come from those who deny everything. Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador in Washington in the mid-1990s and therefore an interested party, admits at Brookings (2008) that domestic politics and lobbying count for tone and timing, but argues that the decisions of substance are taken by presidents attentive to strategic factors, and cites Aaron David Miller, who recalls no important decision tied to a lobbyist’s phone call. Chris Toensing and Mitchell Plitnick, in MERIP (2007), from a position critical of Israel, reach a similar conclusion by another route. They recall that officials saw the Middle East through the prism of the Cold War, that the major pro-Israel institutions emerge in the Reagan years, with the alliance already settled, and that American policy shows continuities since Truman. Kenneth Stein, of Emory, cites for his part the memoirs of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle (1983), in which Carter’s national security adviser describes the simultaneous sale of aircraft to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel as a strategy to paralyse the powerful Israel lobby on Capitol Hill. The testimony confirms two things at once. The lobby exists, and officials treat it as an obstacle to be worked around, not as a master.

What the documents allow us to affirm is uncomfortable for both camps. Pro-Israel lobbying is a real institution, with growing financing and methods that since 2021 include direct electoral spending against specific legislators. It is effective at the margin, where it raises the cost of individual dissent and protects the status quo when the matter does not occupy a president. It did not manufacture the alliance, which was established for Cold War reasons and survived lost battles such as those of 1981 and 2015. What no archive can establish, because history offers no counterfactuals, is how much aid would have been granted without it. This is the position of the episode, supported by what Little, Tal and Drew document and not by an impossible quantitative demonstration.

Each visible defeat teaches what was previously only supposed, that punishment is not automatic, and a threat that ceases to be certain loses much of its value. What remains is the alliance itself, older than the apparatus, sustained by an architecture of subsidies that a shift in public opinion takes years to dismantle, if it manages to dismantle it at all. The next episode leaves Washington, because the diplomatic impunity this series describes does not rest on a single ally, and Europe has played its part in full…

G.S.

Sources

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History of Zionism

EP08 – AIPAC and American lobbying

Kenen’s office and the question the Senate left open

An alliance born before the lobby

Three tests of strength, three different outcomes

From the office to the ballot box, and what the ballot box returned

What historians dispute, and what no archive can settle

Sources

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Kenen’s office and the question the Senate left open

An alliance born before the lobby

Three tests of strength, three different outcomes

From the office to the ballot box, and what the ballot box returned

What historians dispute, and what no archive can settle

Sources

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