{"id":35548,"date":"2026-08-03T06:54:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T06:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=35548"},"modified":"2026-08-03T06:54:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T06:54:23","slug":"the-pro-israel-lobby-has-swayed-us-presidents-since-truman-it-must-end-with-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=35548","title":{"rendered":"The pro-Israel lobby has swayed US presidents since Truman. It must end with Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Collage<\/a>
Illustration: Jordan Bohannon\/The Guardian\/Getty Images\/White House<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Our new book tracks the growth over nearly eight decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in US history<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1948, with war raging in Palestine<\/a>, Harry Truman found himself trapped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president\u2019s 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 hand 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cthe true organizer of victory\u201d in the Second World War. After the war, it was Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement\u2019s 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\u2019s most important military and foreign policy advisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the [Israel] lobby used enormous resources … to punish or reward politicians<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi \u201cFinal Solution\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s own account<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"two<\/a>
President Harry Truman shakes hands with secretary of state George Marshall in Washington DC on 29 May 1947. Photograph: Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Such a move, according to Marshall, would be a \u201ctransparent dodge to win a few votes\u201d, he said, leaving the \u201cgreat dignity of the office of the President \u2026 seriously diminished\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s electoral votes to the Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Today, the influence of the groups loosely known as the Israel lobby has only become more powerful. Truman\u2019s bind \u2013 caught between his sense of the national interest and the domestic political price of defying a powerful lobby \u2013 was something that, in the decades to come, president after president would experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"the<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To fast forward: Donald Trump\u2019s 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\u00a045%<\/a>\u00a0of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That decision may be most quickly explained as yet another example of the erratic policymaking that defines Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our new book, Israel\u2019s Lobby, tracks the growth over decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in American history. Comprised of a panoply of organizations, groups and individuals who advocate American policies that explicitly favor the interests of Israel, the lobby was nurtured \u2013 and has been encouraged and guided \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over 20 years after the Truman episode, for example, President Gerald Ford launched what he referred to as a \u201creassessment\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"two<\/a>
President Gerald Ford talks with secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in Vladivostok, Soviet Union, on 23 November 1974. Photograph: Consolidated News Pictures\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The reassessment was conducted by the committee of \u201cWise Men\u201d 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 that Israel withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to achieve a comprehensive peace, in cooperation with the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s decisive achievement was a\u00a0letter\u00a0drafted by AIPAC and delivered to Ford demanding that the president \u201cmake it clear \u2026 that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future negotiations\u201d, signed by 76 senators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ford was \u201cmad as hell\u201d at what he believed to be an Israeli campaign to use the lobby to obstruct diplomacy. But he was cowed. To protect his election chances the following year, Ford rejected the unanimous recommendation from the \u201cWise Men\u201d, returning instead to the step-by-step process that had so infuriated him, a process of essentially buying slices of the Sinai Peninsula \u2013 seized from Egypt in 1967 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That included a sweeping new collection of US political, economic, military and diplomatic commitments made in a US-Israeli\u00a0Memorandum of Agreement<\/a>\u00a0that, 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 \u201cmind-boggling\u201d and \u201csimply incredible\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cPalestinian homeland\u201d as a key feature of the Middle East peace he wished to achieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilized against Carter\u2019s peace initiative. In a closely held 50-page memorandum<\/a> for the president in early June, Carter\u2019s 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<\/a> as the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin\u2019s increasingly inflexible positions. His differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel\u2019s prime minister in May 1977, were even sharper. Meanwhile Carter began intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cas soon as possible a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict\u201d. Though fully expecting opposition to the president\u2019s 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\u2019s national security adviser, who was present at the meeting, \u201cDayan 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 \u2026 \u2018I can go,\u2019 said Dayan, \u2018to the American Jews.\u2019\u201d Faced with this threat, Carter surrendered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next day, Vance and Dayan issued a joint statement summarizing a US-Israeli \u201cworking paper\u201d 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 result was a celebrated \u201cseparate peace\u201d 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\u2019s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and settlement projects that resulted in Israel\u2019s de facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"three<\/a>
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<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

It is likely, 13 years later, that President George HW Bush felt just as Carter must have felt when, faced with the Israel lobby\u2019s 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 the occupied territories and faced ferocious opposition from the Israel lobby for doing so. In a press conference, he described his exasperation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re up against very strong and effective, sometimes, groups that go up to [Capitol Hill]\u201d Bush said. \u201cI heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the hill working the other side of the question. We\u2019ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lobby\u2019s 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 \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d to the problem, he launched a high-profile peace initiative to be jump-started by a full-scale Israeli freeze on West Bank settlements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a storm of outrage in Israel and among leaders of Israel\u2019s 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 peace process envoy George Mitchell, who was closely identified as friendly to the Palestinians, with Dennis Ross, a lobby insider,\u00a0whose advice to ditch the effort<\/a>\u00a0altogether, 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\u2019s address to the United Nations General Assembly in the first year of his second term, he shifted dramatically from the 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\u2019s insistence on direct negotiations between the parties, and condemned challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"three<\/a>
President Barack Obama, center, arrives with 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<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The reason for Obama\u2019s dramatic retreat is easily inferable from his memoir, A Promised Land, in which he complains about AIPAC\u2019s ability to cow American politicians into obeisance by invoking fears of being labelled antisemitic, and emphasized his own particular vulnerability to such threats as \u201ca Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

More recently, in Joe Biden, the Israel lobby found a president who genuinely believed the Jewish state deserved the \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with the US. The firmness of that commitment was put to the test by Israel\u2019s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Socialized into accepting the lobby\u2019s mantra that any \u201cdaylight\u201d between Washington and Jerusalem would encourage Arab intransigence, and remembering the political punishment Obama received for showing \u201ctough love\u201d 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<\/a> defending Israeli actions as limited, necessary and designed to reduce civilian casualties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

The experience of these administrations demonstrates the wisdom and extraordinary insight of America\u2019s 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 \u201cpassionate attachment\u201d 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\u2019s interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 high costs for knuckling to Israel and its lobby.\u00a0Nearly a third<\/a>\u00a0of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Harris in 2024 said that ending Israel\u2019s violence in Gaza was the top issue influencing their voting decisions. Across both parties, support for Israel has plummeted; sixty percent of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, and a record number of Israel critics are winning congressional primaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But these losses have not deterred Israel or its lobby from working to reverse Trump\u2019s 2024 campaign promises to avoid wars in the Middle East, to pursue even closer relations<\/a> between the US and Israeli militaries, and to spend millions to thwart the rise of critics of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But unless other groups can act freely with other interests in mind \u2013 and without the threat of antisemitism accusations \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference Link:- https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2026\/aug\/02\/pro-israel-lobby-presidents<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our new book tracks the growth over nearly eight decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in US history In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped. On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president\u2019s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[32879,512,32878,1510,32877,8847,23963,23972,349,18540,32876],"class_list":["post-35548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sample-category","tag-aipac","tag-america-2","tag-elections-jewsish-lobby","tag-israel-2","tag-jewish-influence-in-american-politics","tag-netanyahu-3","tag-politics-3","tag-president-trump-3","tag-us-2","tag-zionism-2","tag-zionist-lobby","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35549,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35548\/revisions\/35549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}