In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped.
On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world.
With the exception perhaps of George Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who, as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war. After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.
In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers.
Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but also irritated by and at times furious with the constant hectoring to which he was subjected by campaigners for recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine, including the World Zionist Organization and a host of other Jewish delegations, friends and politicians. Despite his personal exasperation, he could not ignore them. Coming in an election year that would pit him against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, pressures from the Zionist lobby forced him into an excruciating and embarrassing position.
With Palestine engulfed by civil war, Arab states threatening to invade and the last British soldiers about to leave the country, Truman called a meeting of his top advisers on 12 May 1948. According to Marshall’s own account of the meeting, he warned Truman against adopting the policy strongly advanced by Clark Clifford, his main political adviser, to recognize the state of Israel before it was established.
President Harry Truman shakes hands with secretary of state George Marshall in Washington DC on 29 May 1947. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Such a move, according to Marshall, would be a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, he said, leaving the “great dignity of the office of the President … seriously diminished”. Marshall declared he would not personally be able to vote for Truman should he bow to political pressure on the issue. A shaken Truman closed the meeting by saying he agreed with Marshall.
However, within two days, exquisitely sensitive to the tenuousness of his hold on the presidency and the power of Zionist sympathizers to throw New York’s electoral votes to the Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel.
Today, the influence of the groups loosely known as the Israel lobby has only become more powerful. Truman’s bind – caught between his sense of the national interest and the domestic political price of defying a powerful lobby – was something that, in the decades to come, president after president would experience.
How to burst the Israeli bubble
To fast forward: Donald Trump’s decision to go to war on Iran earlier this year came after a sustained campaign by Israel to convince the US to join the disastrous operation. It also came in defiance of several of his top advisers, as well as the 45% of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That decision may be most quickly explained as yet another example of the erratic policymaking that define Trump’s two terms as president. But a closer examination of the experience of several of his predecessors reveals that this presidential decision is more the rule than the exception.
The fact is that from Truman to Trump, most American presidents have caved to the demands of Israel and its advocates. Driven by the fear of domestic political defeats, presidents have regularly rejected or abandoned foreign policies that both they and their most senior advisers believed were in the best interests of the US and at the expense of making meaningful progress in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Our new book, Israel’s Lobby, tracks the growth over decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in American history. Composed of a panoply of organizations, groups and individuals who advocate American policies that explicitly favor the interests of Israel, the lobby was nurtured – and has been encouraged and guided – by Israeli governments. Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the lobby used enormous resources and concentrated attention to punish or reward politicians at every level depending on their willingness to follow lobby instructions.
Over 20 years after the Truman episode, for example, President Gerald Ford launched what he referred to as a “reassessment” of US policy in the Middle East. The initiative had been advanced by Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as a way to escape from two years of embarrassing failures to move toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. Both Ford and Kissinger had become intensely dissatisfied with Israeli stonewalling.
President Gerald Ford talks with secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in Vladivostok, Soviet Union, on 23 November 1974. Photograph: Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images
The reassessment was conducted by the committee of “Wise Men” convened by Kissinger: former government officials who had served as pillars of the postwar US foreign policy establishment. The unanimous recommendation of the committee was pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to achieve a comprehensive peace, in cooperation with the Soviet Union.
Clear indications that Ford intended to accept this recommendation triggered a powerful mobilization by leading Israel lobby organizations, such as the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). The lobby’s decisive achievement was a letter drafted by Aipac and delivered to Ford demanding that the president “make it clear … that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future negotiations”, signed by 76 senators.
Ford was “mad as hell” at what he believed to be an Israeli campaign to use the lobby to obstruct diplomacy. But he was cowed. To protect his chances for election the following year, Ford rejected the unanimous recommendation from the “Wise Men”, returning instead to the step-by-step process that had so infuriated him, a process of essentially buying slices of the Sinai Peninsula – seized from Egypt in 1967 – from Israel with increasing amounts of aid and then returning them to Egypt. Ford and Kissinger also vastly increased the scale and scope of US support for Israel.
That included a sweeping new collection of US political, economic, military and diplomatic commitments made in a US-Israeli Memorandum of Agreement that, along with secret annexes, was signed on 1 September 1975. Aides to Kissinger described the guarantees and concessions made to Israel in these negotiations as “mind-boggling” and “simply incredible”. In his memoir, Ford wrote bitterly about the Aipac letter signed by three-quarters of the Senate that had ruined his diplomatic plans and cast a pall on his election campaign.
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Indeed, Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter. The lobby hoped Carter, who won 71% of the Jewish vote, would abandon aspirations for a comprehensive Middle East peace, but he was quick to disappoint. The president set his sights on a peace treaty resolving the core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With high poll numbers and an American public that seemed ready for a commonsense, problem-solving president, Carter voiced his belief in March 1977 in the need for a “Palestinian homeland” as a key feature of the Middle East peace he wished to achieve.
The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilized against Carter’s peace initiative. In a closely held 50-page memorandum for the president in early June, Carter’s senior adviser on domestic political affairs warned him that he would suffer serious consequences, including risks of failing to receive the renomination of his party, as a result of lobby opposition to his public consideration of a Palestinian homeland. Undeterred, Carter offered direct criticism of what he described in an Oval Office meeting as the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s increasingly inflexible positions. His differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in May 1977, were even sharper. Meanwhile Carter began intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.
In October 1977, the US secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, issued a joint communique with Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, committing the superpowers to achieving “as soon as possible a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict”. Though fully expecting opposition to the president’s Middle East policy, the administration was stunned by the nearly apoplectic reaction to the US-Soviet statement by both the Israeli government and the lobby. Profoundly concerned with the political damage, Carter requested a meeting with the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, in New York. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, who was present at the meeting, “Dayan in effect blackmailed the President by saying that unless he had assurances that we would oppose an independent West Bank and that we would give them economic and military aid, he would have to indicate our unwillingness in his public statements here in the United States … ‘I can go,’ said Dayan, ‘to the American Jews.’” Faced with this threat, Carter surrendered.
The next day, Vance and Dayan issued a joint statement summarizing a US-Israeli “working paper” prepared in the early hours of the morning. The statement affirmed negotiations would be dramatically scaled back and would not frame a Palestinian homeland as a central issue. The end result was a celebrated “separate peace” between Israel and Egypt that earned Carter, Begin and Sadat Nobel peace prizes, but also led to the isolation of Egypt in the Arab world and the assassination of Sadat. It also set the stage for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and settlement projects that resulted in Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, left; US president, Jimmy Carter, center; and Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin clasp hands on the north lawn of the White House after signing the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, on 26 March 1979.Photograph: Bob Daugherty/AP
It is likely, 13 years later, that President George HW Bush felt just as Carter must have felt when, faced with the Israel lobby’s ferocious opposition to his Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, he made public his frustration with its influence. In a failed effort to boost the prospects for the upcoming Madrid peace conference, Bush suspended US loan guarantees amounting to what Israel was spending on housing in occupied territories and faced ferocious opposition from the Israel lobby for doing so. In a press conference he described his exasperation.
“We’re up against very strong and effective, sometimes, groups that go up to [Capitol Hill]” Bush said. “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.”
The lobby’s ability to thwart presidential peace initiatives was on particularly powerful display again during the Obama administration. No president before him had entered the White House with such detailed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, such a record of personal engagement with both Jews and Palestinians, and such a sustained commitment to closer American relations with Arabs and Muslims. Fully embracing a “two-state solution” to the problem, he launched a high-profile peace initiative to be jumpstarted by a full-scale Israeli freeze on West Bank settlements.
But a storm of outrage in Israel and among leaders of Israel’s lobby in the United States, and the public feud that erupted between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, proved more costly to the former than the latter. Obama quickly reversed course, in effect replacing his peace process envoy George Mitchell, who was closely identified as friendly to the Palestinians, with Dennis Ross, a lobby insider, whose advice to ditch the effort altogether the president quickly implemented. Instead of pressing Israel to stop settlements, Obama made a personal call to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, threatening to pull $450m in American aid to the Palestinians if Abbas did not withdraw an anti-settlement resolution put forward at the UN security council. In Obama’s address to the United Nations, general assembly, in the first year of his second term, he shifted dramatically from language used in his previous UN speeches. Instead of criticizing Israeli settlements and pressing for a two-state solution, he identified himself with Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism, opposed any UN action contrary to Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations between the parties, and condemned challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.
President Barack Obama, center, arrives with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, right, to make a statement on Middle East peace talks in the east room of the White House on 1 September 2010. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
The reason for Obama’s dramatic retreat is easily inferable from his memoir, A Promised Land, in which he complains about Aipac’s ability to cow American politicians into obeisance by invoking fears of being labelled antisemitic, and emphasized his own particular vulnerability to such threats as “a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan”.
More recently, in Joe Biden, the Israel lobby found a president who genuinely believed the Jewish state deserved the “special relationship” with the US. The firmness of that commitment was put to the test by Israel’s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Socialized into accepting the lobby’s mantra that any “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem would encourage Arab intransigence, and remembering the political punishment Obama received for showing “tough love” to the Israelis, Biden, quashed all recommendations from his top advisers to do something meaningful to stop the Israeli onslaught on Gazan Palestinians. When he did make limited complaints about excessive civilian casualties and implemented minor delays in American resupply of Israeli armaments, the Republican Jewish Coalition responded by slamming the administration for inserting daylight into the US-Israel relationship, while Aipac sent a detailed memorandum to members of Congress defending Israeli actions as limited, necessary and designed to reduce civilian casualties.
The experience of these administrations demonstrates the wisdom and extraordinary insight of America’s first president, George Washington. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned that the American system of government could all too easily be exploited by a group with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. In a system designed to rely on the mobilization of countervailing power to limit the effects of factions driven by self-interest or very particular points of view, Washington argued that since any faction committed to the interests of another country would not naturally find its influence checked by effective domestic opposition, it would therefore drive the United States into exaggerated and dangerous commitments abroad and implicate it in quarrels and wars contrary to the country’s interests.
In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Biden and Kamala Harris paid heavy costs for knuckling to Israel and its lobby. Nearly a third of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Harris in 2024 said that ending Israel’s violence in Gaza was the top issue influencing their voting decisions. Across both parties, support for Israel has plummeted; 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, and a record number of Israel critics are winning congressional primaries.
But these losses have not deterred Israel or its lobby from working to reverse Trump’s 2024 campaign promises to avoid wars in the Middle East, to pursue even closer relations between the US and Israeli militaries, and to spend millions to thwart the rise of critics of the country.
The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world
To be sure, American supporters of Israel and its governments have every right to express their opinions and work to shape public policy, and the lobby is by no means the only vehicle for moneyed interests that warp American democracy. Moreover, American presidents have free will: the George W Bush administration was run by many who were in perfect ideological alignment with the Israeli right. An incompetent and gullible Trump is plainly responsible for yielding to Israeli pressure and dragging the US into the latest war.
But unless other groups are able to act freely with other interests in mind – and without the threat of antisemitism accusations – US policy in the Middle East will remain dangerously distorted. Both to secure and advance American interests abroad and to protect American freedoms at home, Americans must unite to prevent any foreign power from enjoying the influence over policy and public debate that Israel has exercised, both directly and through the faction operating on its behalf.
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Eli Clifton is a co-founder and senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
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Ian Lustick is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in Arab-Israeli relations and US foreign policy
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This essay was adapted from the book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power , out 11 August by Atria/One Signal Publishers
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