Israel does not run U.S. foreign policy

The state of Israel does not run U.S. foreign policy. Likewise, the pro-Israel lobby, a coalition of active parties mingling Jewish and gentile voices, does not dictate the terms of Washington’s engagement with the greater Middle East. There is nothing intrinsically wrong or offensive in suggesting that any one lobby does have too much say over policymaking. Antisemites who seek to make hay out of this point should be firmly confronted. But otherwise the charge that AIPAC, say, carries too much weight should be no more a taboo in debate than whether the tobacco or firearms lobby does. It is a question to be tested rather than shunned. 

In this case, however, the reality is more prosaic. Israel is less powerful in the metropole than often assumed.

To many, this will seem counter-intuitive. America’s recent closeness to Tel Aviv (or “Jerusalem”, now that America backs Israel’s claim to the entirety of that city) over everything from Iran to Gaza suggests otherwise. If the two states are often aligned, if they coordinate closely, and above all if America finds itself embroiled on Israel’s side in escalating crises that don’t obviously serve its national interests, it is tempting to assume that this is best explained by the old story of a tail wagging the overdog. On that account, Israel exerts a distorting influence on U.S. decision-making. If this is so, the conclusion follows that fixing U.S. policy failure demands that Americans curtail Israel’s outsized sway.

However, it isn’t so. Israel as an actor in Washington is better regarded not as a uniquely effective (or demonic) force but as one effective lobby amongst a group of client states of the greater Middle East, who work round the clock to get their way. Indeed, the various lobbies in the U.S. capital check and constrain one another. A pro-Israel lobbyist will have to jostle against equally active envoys of Pakistan, Egypt, and the Gulf monarchies. Yes, the U.S. gives Israel a generous defence subsidy and often, diplomatic cover. Yet it also stands sentry for anxious Gulf states on occasion, and it annually donates to Egypt, the largest recipient of its aid. Against Israeli objections before the present era of détente, Washington also made large arms deals with the locals, even while ensuring Israel with “qualitative military advantage” enjoys a favourable margin. But often when it counts, America’s closest ally in the region finds it doesn’t have a veto.  

As Israel rediscovered recently, as with other lobbies, there is a ceiling to its leverage. Take President Donald Trump’s recent, and vocal, public lashing out at Israel for its persistent air assault on Lebanon, a campaign that threatens to derail an already thin and fragile ceasefire with Tehran. Mere rhetoric? No. Trump has form in cutting aid or levying tariffs even on allied states, or threatening to do so, including Israel. When in October 2025 the Knesset entertained legislation to formally annex West Bank territory seized by settlements, Trump warned that if it proceeded, the U.S. would cut off assistance. This was not because he grieved for the fate of Palestinians, but because it jeopardised progress in the Abraham Accords negotiation with the Gulf monarchies. Then, as now, Israel is not the only game in town regarding lobbying. The U.S. is solicitous of other regional partners. Trump’s warning took effect. Israeli legislators postponed the bill. And it is surely dispositive that then, and now, the president reputed for being the most solicitous of its middle eastern ally now forcefully reacts against it. 

No doubt, regarding Trump’s latest public remonstrations, domestic political performance is in the mix. Trump has an interest in showing some daylight between himself and the regime given the unpopularity of Operation Epic Fury and the accusation that the U.S. too easily does Israel’s bidding. But there is usually a bigger policy picture. The Trump court really does care about the preservation of the new ceasefire agreement, even if only for selfish reasons. They did and do want the latest round of hostilities with Iran to cease, given the costs and trouble wrought by its four-month military adventure in the Gulf. And they rightly suspect that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s obstinate insistence on a war of elimination against Hezbollah makes it harder for the new armistice over Iran to hold. American and Israeli interests diverge unignorably. In a world where Israel conducted or hopelessly overshadowed the making of U.S. foreign policy, the president’s reproach would be more private and muted.

Consider the larger historical record. Most American presidents — even ones generally friendly to the Jewish state — have ended up drawing lines to limit how far they will meet Israel’s demands. John F. Kennedy warned Israel unsuccessfully not to pursue a nuclear weapon, Richard Nixon in general distanced his administration from it, and Jimmy Carter coerced both Israel and Egypt into signing the Camp David Accords by threatening to blame either party as spoiler. But the heart of the debate goes to what happened next. As theorists of the Israel Lobby tell it, from that historical point onwards, the state acquired heightened influence via increased lobbying activity, and successfully attached pro-Israel commitment to the repertoire of American hawkish internationalism. 

And yet. Even from that point, on multiple occasions the U.S. defied demands and applied counter-pressure. Ronald Reagan despite his embrace of a coalition of Christian evangelical groups and Israeli nationalists still coerced Israel when it bucked against American preferences. He withheld promised warplanes and voted to condemn the strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. The following year, he suspended the delivery of warplanes and cluster munitions over the Lebanon invasion. 

In our time, American-Israeli relations have become fraught partly because one president, Barack Obama, overruled  Israel’s objections on a fundamental issue. Obama negotiated the JCPOA with Iran, reducing and monitoring its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief, that incensed Israeli and American hawks. True, Israel was able to work effectively to undermine it and encourage the formation of an anti-JCPOA movement in U.S. domestic politics. But the fact that Washington had done a big thing in the region against its outright opposition points back to the problem. If the lobby was as powerful as some fear it is, events wouldn’t have moved from that juncture. Neither would the Trump administration be doing things now to suspend an incomplete military campaign against Iran, despite Israel’s urgings that it finish the job, or to help reconstruct Iran with the promise that partners will pour in hundreds of billions of dollars of aid. 

Beyond Palestine, the centrepiece of today’s complaints about Israeli influence goes back to Iraq, the forcible overthrow in March 2003 of the B’aath regime and the disastrous aftermath. Part of the indictment against the Israel lobby is the claim that it drags America into foolish wars.  Now, Israel’s government and pro-Israel lobby groups did welcome the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s rejectionist regime. Some American advocates of regime change in Baghdad hoped Saddam’s removal would catalyse a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But Israel and its organised supporters in the U.S. mostly did not actively seek it. If anything, Tel Aviv worried more about Iran. Lobby groups feared being too associated with the war and refrained from vocal support. Israel and the Israel lobby was more sympathetic bystander than a driving force. As articulated by U.S. hawks, Iraq mattered primarily in terms of national interests. Israel they did not see as a separate third party to assist. Rather, it mattered primarily as a pro-American bulwark in the region. The Israel “link” was at best supplementary.

Another way of tackling this issue is to run the counterfactual: if the Israel lobby did not exist, would America’s posture in the region be so different? Likely, no. Washington, wisely or otherwise, traditionally regards the Middle East as important, weighty enough to merit onshore commitments, active partnerships and occasionally investments in blood and treasure. Whether it could secure the interests it has there from a more offshore remove is another question to be debated separately. The fact is, it thinks the region matters as one of the world’s power centres, and for reasons separate from Israel. It has a bipartisan consensus that the U.S. should be the leading state on the ground, to stabilise the neighbourhood, that Iranian revisionism and expansionism is a threat, and that its benign hegemony is needed to keep the sea lanes and chokepoints open, the oil flowing, and to prevent any hostile state seizing command of it. As Noam Chomsky quipped, America might support Israel as its most convenient ally and foothold, but it doesn’t need Israel to persuade it that it wants primacy in the region. It believed so well before it aligned closely with Israel, and well before Israel proved itself powerful, able to punch above its weight, and as a horse worth backing.

 What about Gaza? Doesn’t the Biden administration’s tepid, tentative and slowball response to Israel’s assault, and its very delayed threat to withhold the supply of offensive weapons over Rafah, suggest something about Israel’s centrality in America’s calculus? Not necessarily. It might suggest something darker, namely Palestine’s marginality. When it comes down to the ultimate question of what the U.S. is willing to bleed for, or risk for, it just doesn’t care enough about the cause of Palestinian statehood, especially in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023. It wishes Palestinians well, and regrets Israel’s razing of Gaza, but isn’t willing to hold the relationship hostage to that issue. Neither, in fairness, are other onlooking regimes.

Similarly, the cause of recognising and commemorating the Armenian genocide proved not so important to Washington, and expendable for the sake of its larger relationship with Turkey. Indeed, as lobbying efforts go, Turkey notched up an important win on that issue. And again, this did not translate into a general licence to do as it pleased. The U.S. removed it from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme when it purchased and activated the Russian S-400 air defence system. Regarding Riyadh, while Washington obviously would prefer its client states not to murder and dismember U.S. journalists, its beef over the dissident Jamal Khashoggi it deemed expendable to its relationship with the Kingdom. Yet neither does the Kingdom uniformly get its way. It also campaigned against the JCPOA in vain, met disappointment when America turned down its requests to attack Iran, and had US support curtailed over its bombing of Yemen. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s quiet attempt at stabilising its relations with Iran via detente must have something to do with its increased anxiety that the superpower, less beholden to Saudi oil and with its interests at times diverging, won’t reliably protect it in the long term. Pakistan may extract billions in military and economic aid from an America keen to maintain collaborative ties, but that didn’t help its efforts to block the US-India 123 nuclear agreement, nor the Abbottabad Raid to snuff out Osama Bin Laden. These are cases that highlight the rough compromises of diplomacy, defensible or not. None of them are a “smoking gun” for more ambitious claims about who runs American policy. 

Let’s also be wary of an overcorrection. The true story, regarding Israel and America, is not the opposite, that the U.S. remains independent and entirely self-directed. Foreign lobbies in Washington can “nudge” the superpower, tilt elite opinion in their favour and extract significant benefits and rents, especially given the limits on any president’s bandwidth and the demands of competing claims on American attention. After all, they wouldn’t go to so much effort to set up camp in the Washington ecosystem if it were otherwise. There will always be determined players who know more, who can offer an anxious power access, intelligence and support, and who can take advantage of their patron to a degree. It is a price of empire — even if, in this case, it is empire by invitation.

If America’s exertions in the Middle East are a wasteful distraction, that is primarily because of American miscalculations, not the manipulations of other parties

So, to say that lobbies don’t run policy is not to say they are trivial. As well as the direct process of requesting and receiving largesse, it can provide fodder for domestic politics.  Recall President George H.W. Bush in 1991, when he directly tied a $10 billion U.S. loan guarantee package to a halt on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza and publicly confronted Israel. (His son, otherwise well disposed to Israel, would later do similarly, withholding loan guarantees in response to illegal construction in the area). Then-candidate Bill Clinton seized upon the issue to outflank him to the right, and got some electoral mileage in accusing Bush of weakness. In that sense, a foreign power successfully aligned the cause of alliance solidarity with the argument over American strength in the world.

All of this priced in, it still does not add up to control, or the hyperbolic claim that the Capitol is Israel-occupied territory. To show influence on policy — which demonstrably exists- is not to show the origin of policy. Historically, the U.S. tolerates a level of foreign influence up to a point. But it can turn on its clients when interests sharply diverge and when this captures the attention of an often-distracted White House and Congress. The truth is less stark than often imagined. And that means that there isn’t a simple “fix” available. Greater regulation or oversight of lobbying practices may be desirable, but as a supposed antidote, it misses the point. If America’s exertions in the Middle East are a wasteful distraction, that is primarily because of American miscalculations, not the manipulations of other parties. U.S. foreign policy happens in a messy world of pulling, hauling and shoving, not one of tails wagging dogs. Welcome to international politics.