The Zionist Lobby: A Chronicle

Don Greenspon

Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic
By Ilan Pappe
Oneworld Publications, 2024. xviii +521 pages plus bibliography and index, $40 hardcover.

“At the end of the day, many people in the twenty-first century cannot continue to accept a colonization project requiring military occupation and discriminatory laws to sustain itself. There is a point at which the lobby cannot endorse this brutal reality and continue to be seen as moral in the eyes of the world. I believe and hope this point will be reached within our lifetimes.” (521)

THIS IS THE hopeful conclusion of Ilan Pappe’s book. At the outset, this anti-Zionist Israeli historian poses a rhetorical question: “Why does this Jewish state still crave recognition of its legitimacy in the West?” (xi)

In other words, why are the State of Israel and its lobby so intent on opposing “delegitimization” 75 years after its establishment? Given Israel’s enormous political and economic power, why do Israel and its Christian and Jewish lobbies on both sides of the Atlantic invest so many resources in trying to establish its legitimacy?

According to Pappe, a key to resolving the apparent riddle is that those who led the Zionist movement and later Israel were inherently aware of the injustice of the Zionist project. In contrast to some diplomatic studies, Pappe’s narrative never lets the reader forget the underlying reality of Palestinian dispossession, ethnic cleansing and suffering.

He also emphasizes that “Palestinians are not just victims of Israel; they are also agents of their own destiny” whose struggles for their rights “mean that Zionists need to actively erase and deny the past in order to brush over the ethical and moral problems associated with the founding of the state of Israel.” (xiii)

Pappe observes how Israel differs from other settler-colonial states such as the United States and Australia, which crushed the Native Americans and Australian Aborigines to the point that they no longer pose any threat, while the Palestinians remain a living people still resisting their oppression. Pappe maintains that Israel’s consciousness of its origins partly underpins the necessity of its constant advocacy.

lan Pappe is the author of important previous books including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel; A Modern History of Palestine; and The Forgotten Palestinians. A History of the Palestinians in Israel.

Pappe’s new work, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, is a comprehensive account of the Zionist movement’s and Israel’s lobbying efforts, unusual in discussing both Britain and the United States as arenas for the work. While it’s not possible to cover it all in this review, we’ll survey some of the book’s important themes.

The book is detailed but highly readable, including sidelights where the author indulges his obvious love of architectural history, describing historic buildings in Britain and America where elite meetings, conferences or mass public events took place.

Christian Zionism Predates Political Zionism

Pappe’s opening chapter “The Christian Harbingers of Zionism” points out how the concept of an organized Jewish “return to the Holy Land,” began as a Christian discourse before becoming a Jewish political movement in the late 19th century. Christian Zionist beliefs posit that the Jews were and remain God’s “chosen people,” that God gave Palestine to the Jews, and so Jews should be in Palestine.

Jewish return to Palestine is seen particularly by Christian evangelicals as a precondition for an eventual Armageddon to rain down on earth — exterminating Jews and other non-converts to evangelism in the process — while bringing the return of Christ in the apocalyptic Second Coming anticipated in Revelation, the final book of the Bible.

Until then, the Jews as the chosen people would enjoy God’s protection (and the unconditional support of evangelicals), especially in returning to Palestine. Most conveniently, for colonialist thinkers their presence was also conceived as “closely associated with the expansion of British influence in the Arab world as a whole and in Palestine in particular.” (11)

Pappe demonstrates the impact that Christian Zionism had on political Zionism, inspiring Jewish intellectuals such as Theodore Herzl seeking a remedy for anti-Semitism, especially in Eastern Europe.

In the UK, support for Zionism progressed through elite figures from Lord Balfour and David Lloyd-George to Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, all of whom had an evangelical Christian background. This same influence occurred in the United States where Presidents such as Harry Truman and Bill Clinton seem to be influenced in their support for the Israel lobby by their Baptist upbringings.

In Truman’s case it is widely believed that being a devout Baptist and inspired by the Bible caused Truman to immediately recognize Israel on May 15, 1948, against the advice of many of his trusted advisers.

In 2017 the Israeli government initiated an annual Christian Media Summit to enhance communications with Christian figures, including far-right preachers. In a 2019 state visit to Brazil, then and Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, heaped praise on both Brazilian evangelicals and the authoritarian Bolsonaro government, declaring: “We have no better friends in the world than the Evangelical community.”

Just recently President elect Donald Trump has nominated Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel and the notorious Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Both have strong Christian Zionist beliefs. Speaking to reporters in 2017, Huckabee said the following:

“There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighborhoods. They’re cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.”

And Hegseth speaking in Jerusalem a few years ago made the following inflammatory comment:

“There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.”

Indeed, in recent years AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the central pillar of the Zionist lobby, turned to the U.S. Christian evangelical movement as its most trusted supporter. It has also long abandoned its onetime bipartisan stance in both U.S. and Israeli politics, aligning itself with the Republican Party and hard-right Israeli forces.

Antisemitic Motivations

Pappe describes the ways that much support for Zionism was animated by anti-Semitism. The 67-word Balfour Declaration from Lord Arthur Balfour, then the British Foreign Secretary, which announced that the British government would support establishing a national home for the Jewish people, would change the course of history in the Middle East “once it was incorporated into the [League of Nations] Mandate charter in 1922.” (54)

Despite his iconic support for Zionism, Balfour was hardly a friend to the Jews. In the late 19th century, pogroms targeting Jews in Eastern Europe led to waves of Jewish refugees to England and the United States. This influx led to an increase in anti-immigrant racism in general and antisemitism in particular.

As English public sentiment grew for keeping Jews out, the public found a sympathetic ear in Balfour. While serving as Britain’s Prime Minister in 1905, Balfour presided over the passage of the Aliens Act which restricted immigration, primarily Jewish immigration. According to the historical record, Balfour gave passionate speeches about the necessity of restricting waves of Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian Empire from entering Britain.

Edwin Montagu, a Jewish cabinet member, waged war against the Balfour Declaration. He recognized that much support for Zionism was motivated by the desire to get rid of the Jews, and the establishment of the Zionist project would in turn fuel further anti-Semitism.

Pappe quotes Montagu in this regard:

“When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its current inhabitants.”

Montagu continued:

“If Palestine will be the National Home of the Jews-all the voters in my constituency will tell me: Go Home.” (47)

In the early 1900s Louis Brandeis, who later became an esteemed justice of the United States Supreme Court, was tasked with rallying support for Zionism in America.

Previously a true believer in America being a “melting pot,” Brandeis had to deal with the phenomenon later referred to as the “dual loyalty problem.” He was forced to shift gears from viewing American Jews as members of society who happened to belong to a religion, to seeing them as members of a national group entitled to their own homeland.

To accomplish this sleight of hand, Brandeis invented bizarre aphorisms such as: “To be good Americans we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews we must become Zionists.” (109) Such verbal gymnastics notwithstanding, Brandeis did very little to solve this conundrum.

In Britain the Labour Party, contrary to conventional wisdom, was and has been a stronger supporter of Zionism than the Conservative Party. Until 1914, the socialist Second International took an assimilationist perspective on the “Jewish question:” Jews were part of the working class, who despite having a different language and distinct customs, were not a nation.

In 1919 the reconstituted Socialist International reconsidered Zionism. It passed a resolution sponsored by Poale Zion (antecedent to the Jewish Labor Movement) recognizing the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in historical Palestine.

The justification for this change in position was twofold. First, the Zionist project was lauded as bringing superior civilization to the Arabs. Second, Zionism was supposedly solving the plight of Jewish workers by creating a “socialist society” which would play a lead role in economic development.

Accusations of Antisemitism

In discussing the use of “antisemitism” accusations for the lobby’s advocacy, Pappe highlights its false charges targeting J. William Fulbright and Jeremy Corbyn in the United States and Britain respectively.

From 1962-1974 J. William Fulbright was one of America’s most principled and powerful Senators. He had a record of being on the right side of history, he rejected McCarthyism, criticized Kennedy’s adventurism in Cuba, sought détente with Russia, advocated for the disarmament of nuclear weapons, and eventually became a critic of the Vietnam War.

He became a critic of AIPAC because of Israel’s repressive policy towards the Palestinians, his feeling that U.S. policy was abandoning the Arab world, and he especially questioned AIPAC’s domestic operations.

As Chair of the Senate’s powerful Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright was concerned how foreign countries and their lobbies (especially Israel and AIPAC) influenced foreign policy.

He alleged that AIPAC was in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and held hearings that produced damning evidence which made him. the lobby’s arch nemesis who had to be deposed by any means necessary. Campaign money poured into the coffers of his rival, Arkansas Governor Dale Bumpers, who defeated Fulbright in the May 1974 Democratic primary election.

A young Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at this time. The campaign against Fulbright became an AIPAC model for the future, which has used its vast resources to defeat progressive candidates such as Andy Levin, Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush in recent elections.

In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 election to lead the Labour Party antagonized the pro-Israel lobby, which worked to depose him from day one. The lobby tried to scrape the bottom of the barrel with numerous false accusations to tar Corbyn as an antisemite.

The specific examples of Corbyn’s alleged antisemitism were fabrications: he never said Jews don’t understand “English irony,” he did not lay a wreath to terrorists, and he did not approve of an antisemitic mural.

The lobby’s attacks on Corbyn occurred even though his views on Israel/Palestine were objectively moderate, virtually identical to those expressed by most British diplomats and senior politicians.

Pappe reasonably asks: “Why did the lobby see him as such a threat”? He answers: “They suspected, correctly, that he sincerely believed in a just two-state solution and wouldn’t swallow Israel’s excuses for obstructing it.” (471)

What also must be said is that these intentionally false charges helped derail Corbyn’s Labour Party’s real and popular economic case for reversing austerity, and Britain was denied the opportunity to reverse the neoliberal policies that had begun in 1979.

Among much material that can’t be adequately covered here, activists might find the chapters “Lobbying for Israel in Twentieth Century America,” “Lobbying for Israel in Twenty-First Century America,” and “The War Against American Civil Society” especially useful.

Pappe provides incisive analyses of the evolution of U.S. policy, the premises behind the U.S.-orchestrated “peace process” that doomed it from the outset, the points where the pro-Israel lobby played important roles – and those where it was of marginal relevance and operated mainly to preserve its own institutional status.

Conclusion and “Global Palestine”

Pappe concludes this book by discussing how well Israel has done in fulfilling its struggle for legitimacy. According to Pappe, Israel’s future viability depends on two pillars of support: material and moral.

As a high-tech country with a strong military and a civil industries exporter, Israel stands on strong material grounds. However, ever since the First Intifada in 1987 and continuing with the many attacks on Gaza since 2006, Israel’s moral standing in the world has been drastically eroded.

The “Jewish state” has failed to convince the world that Palestine was given to the Jews by God, that Palestine was empty at the outset of Jewish colonization, and that Palestinian resistance is driven by hatred of Jews.

Pappe ends his conclusion with a discussion of Israel’s November 2022 election when the most right-wing and messianic government coalition in its history came to power. This government believes it has God on its side and enjoys the huge support of right-wing nationalist and authoritarian movements around the world including America’s Trump, Hungary’s Orban, and India’s Modi.

Perhaps, then, “This means they do not need a lobby. Time will tell if without it, Zionism can prevail. It might well signal the end of Zionism.” (517)

The earth-shattering events of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s genocidal war, however, showed that the lobby remains important in the struggles to come.

In “Afterword: 7 October and the Future,” Pappe discusses October 7, its immediate aftermath, and the prospects for the future. Given the “war crimes and atrocities carried out by Hamas and others” in southern Israel, “Israel was the recipient of almost universal sympathy and support from governments worldwide.” (518)

This changed dramatically with Israel’s brutal attacks which generated condemnation and mass protests globally. This has resulted in two different orientations which Pappe labels “Global Israel” and “Global Palestine.”

According to “Global Israel,” October 7 was “yet another chapter in the history of modern anti-Semitism, this time accomplished with brutality comparable to or even worse than the Nazis and ISIS.” (519) And this narrative claims this attack was planned by evil Iran, even though it is well established that Tehran was not aware of nor involved in the’ October 7 attack.

“Global Palestine” consists of a coalition of social movements around the world, oppressed minorities and some countries in the global South. “Broadly, although not without contention, this coalition supports BDS, the one state solution, and the right of return for refugees,” a position that also “puts it at odds with the liberal Left within Israel.” (520)

“Global Israel” currently has the upper hand, particularly in the global North. However, worldwide support for the Palestinians is much larger and organized than ever before. There are now “cracks in the international shield” that the lobby forged to protect Israel from accountability, “and they might grow in the years to come.” (521)

In addition, Pappe argues, Israeli society is disintegrating. The public has much less faith in the military to defend them, the economy is weakened, there is escalating conflict between religious and secular Jews, and Israel’s standing in the world has significantly deteriorated.

While “so far, Israel continues to be able to act with impunity” and the situation in Israel/Palestine is in its darkest hour, Pappe is hopeful of a future for Palestinians and Israelis free from the chains of an apartheid-like state, the vision that has motivated his entire scholarly work.

March-April 2025, ATC 235