A Must Read Book on the Israel Lobby | Episode 7

Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick have just published a terrific new book called Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power. It appears twenty years after Steve Walt and I published “The Israel Lobby” in The London Review of Books (March 2006), which we turned into a book a year later. Much has happened regarding Israel, the Israel lobby, and the US-Israeli relationship in the two decades since Steve and I first addressed those subjects. Clifton and Lustick do a great job explaining those fundamental changes. In this episode, I will discuss their new book and explain how it differs from what Steve and I wrote in our article and book on the lobby.

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BUY THE BOOKS

1. Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power
by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick
Purchase Here: amzn.to/4gMNJey

2. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
Purchase Here: amzn.to/3SL2M0o

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:28 The book: Israel's Lobby by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick
2:38 The core arguments
5:15 The conceptual framework: discourse vs. policy
7:29 Where the new book breaks from Mearsheimer & Walt
8:01 How the discourse changed: dual loyalty and "Israel Firsters"
12:42 The internet and the collapse of media gatekeeping
15:08 Israeli behavior after October 7th
17:45 Israel as a "crazy state"
22:11 Israeli identity: "a nation that dwells alone"
27:51 Why Americans turned on Israel
29:29 The lobby fights back: redefining antisemitism
32:54 Government crackdowns on campus protests
35:40 Plutocrats, Citizens United, and policy capture
39:11 The bottom line and the big question ahead
41:14 Closing thoughts

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.