‘Against its own interest’: How Israel’s lobby bends American foreign policy

Common sense says every country looks out for itself first. Yet the central claim of a new book, Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, is that the mightiest nation on earth has, president after president from Truman to Trump, acted against its own national interest for the better part of a century.

In the new Think Talk show, Pakistan TV Digital speaks with the book's co-author, Professor Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania, who explains how, in his view, this happened and why it continues.

What Lustick and co-author Eli Clifton describe in the book, published on August 11, 2026, is “a set of organizations that act primarily and very explicitly to promote the interests of another country 6,000 miles away.” Many people in the lobby are Jewish, he noted, but “you can no longer say that a majority of American Jews even support what the lobby is doing.”

The argument has two parts. First, Lustick says, the lobby has distorted US foreign policy for decades. Second, as Israeli policy has grown more extreme, he argues, the lobby can no longer defend it in open debate and has instead sought to suppress criticism, chiefly by branding critics of Israel as antisemites.

“What is at stake with the lobby's power is no longer just American interests abroad,” he said. “It's also American freedoms at home.”

He is Jewish and says that, unable to call him antisemitic, the lobby has for years branded him a “self-hating Jew.”

Pakistan connection

For Pakistani viewers, one of the book's most striking claims concerns Jonathan Pollard, the former US Navy intelligence analyst who spied for Israel in the 1980s and was convicted of espionage.

According to the book, among the intelligence Pollard passed to Israel was satellite imagery of Pakistan's nuclear sites. The authors further report that some of the material was subsequently passed to the Soviet Union.

The case, he argues, links Israeli influence in Washington to a direct US national-security breach involving Pakistan.

Decades later, after a long campaign for his release, Pollard was granted clemency and flew to Israel, where he was welcomed as a hero.

Asked what the case reveals, Lustick said it “does show both the extent of the power of the lobby right now and its limits.” For years, presidents refused to free Pollard because the intelligence and defense communities were “so outraged by the seriousness of the crimes,” which, he said, “compromised American national security in very deep ways.”

Lustick said Donald Trump eventually intervened, in part to repay major donors such as the late Sheldon Adelson.

That points to what Lustick calls the lobby's newer instrument: not public argument, but money. Since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United-era rulings loosened limits on political spending, he said, wealthy donors can pour almost unlimited sums into campaigns.

“Just nine extremely wealthy individuals have donated $1.7 billion on behalf of what they perceive as Israeli interests in the American electoral system,” he estimated.

How the machine works

Lustick describes the lobby as a “panoply” of organizations, with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, among the best known.

Its traditional power, he argues, rested on a simple calculation: ordinary Americans care little about foreign policy, so a lawmaker who defied AIPAC could be punished at the ballot box without receiving a comparable political reward for standing on principle.

Lustick reached back to George Washington, who warned that a faction with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country could push US policy in its favour without a countervailing force because most citizens would not push back on foreign affairs.

Increasingly, Lustick said, AIPAC wins by spending while carefully avoiding explicit references to Israel. In one Michigan primary, he recounted, a candidate faced roughly 100 attack ads costing $32 million, “and only three of them even mentioned Israel.”

AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups reject this characterization, describing themselves as ordinary participants in democratic advocacy.

Is the lobby's grip loosening?

Lustick sees signs of change. Recent primary wins by candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed and Aisha Wahab, alongside polls showing a majority of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, suggest the ground is shifting.

“It does indeed” show waning influence, he said, both in public opinion and in what the Democratic Party is now willing to say aloud.

But he separated public mood from policy. Like the gun lobby, which he said can block laws supported by most Americans, the Israel lobby can lag public opinion for years.

“What we are not seeing,” Lustick said, “is change in American policy toward Israel or the Palestinians. That we're not seeing.”