It's bigger than AIPAC
I talk about the Israel Lobby
I had a nice and deep talk with J.G. Michael who runs the Parallax Views podcast about my thinking on Israel and America.
Why is America so wedded to this foreign state — wedded to the point of being 100 percent complicit in the genocide in Gaza? The “lobby” gets thrown around a lot. But I think it goes deeper than just AIPAC or the other orgs that make up what’s known as the Israel/Jewish Lobby. This focus on a bad evil entity corrupting a good and naive America — an America that, if not for these dark outside forces, would be doing the right thing — is a damaging one, useful only to American First types. It muddies more than it makes clear. To me, the relationship is mostly about empire. Empire is why America backs Israel so unconditionally. Israel’s just been too useful to let go.
The “lobby” is a symptom of this usefulness, not the cause. Take the powerful American corporations that support a free economic relationship with China. These entities — from Apple to Amazon to Walmart — have a lot more money than Israel could ever hope for. And yet this lobby, this China lobby in America, struggles to get its way. Why is that?
The Israel Lobby isn’t an abstract concept to me. My life has been shaped by it. My own Soviet emigration story is a result of American and Israeli imperial interests overlapping. And as it turned out, this pursuit of common American-Israeli interests in the USSR on the Jewish Question birthed the Israel/Jewish Lobby as it exists today. I wrote about it before…and I get into it at length in my talk with J.G.
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Anyway, check out the episode here: The AIPAC Narrative Reexamined: Empire, the Lobby, the Left, and the Limits of Blame w/ Yasha Levine (Sub to his Patreon to get good stuff.)
In this provocative and deeply analytical conversation, journalist and author Yasha Levine joins Parallax Views to challenge a dominant narrative on both the left and right: that the Israel Lobby singularly controls U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Drawing from his background covering Cold War geopolitics and U.S. information warfare, Levine argues that this viewpoint dangerously simplifies the role of American imperialism—and obscures how nationalism, including Zionism, has historically been instrumentalized by empire.
We explore how the U.S. used nationalist movements as tools of psychological warfare against the Soviet Union, and how that framework led Levine to his critique of the “AIPAC as all-powerful” mindset. He explains why this narrative often becomes a convenient scapegoat that distracts from the structural and strategic interests of American power itself.
Levine, a vocal anti-Zionist who has unequivocally described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, also warns of a future in which the U.S. might decide Israel is no longer geopolitically useful—potentially abandoning it, with consequences for the Jewish diaspora.
PS: I had been on J.G.’s show before..talking about Surveillance Valley.
Want to know more?
Interested in listening to what you guys have to say about it. I think there are advantages to believing it comes down to money in politics--that AIPAC is not really different from the NRA, for example. I believe John Mearsheimer says that the lobby pays $100mil in lobbying and gets back $100bil in policy advantages. But I ultimately agree with you on this one. The US needs a chaos actor in the region, for empire, or US capital, or what have you, and I believe that's one of the primary reasons they support the genocide in Gaza.