It’s a rare book so vile that it has the power to render the reader physically nauseated.
Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick, is so repellently disgusting that it left me not only sick to my stomach but feeling frequently, also, like I needed to put it down and go wash my hands thoroughly with soap and water.
The author Dara Horn has famously, and accurately, defined antisemitism as a lie. This book demonstrates the truth of that analysis. The book is full of lies, small and big and starting with the title itself, which falsely defines Americans who support a strong U.S.-Israel relationship as agents of the ally rather than as loyal Americans.
Beyond the title and the core argument are a cesspool of inaccuracies. I counted dozens of them, so many that if the work had been produced in an academic context or with federal funding rather than commercially, there’d be a plausible case for research misconduct.
Jonathan Pollard is described in the book as a “traitor” when actually he was not charged with or convicted of treason but rather pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government. Treason is defined in the Constitution, and Pollard’s actions don’t fit the definition.
Morris Amitay’s name is misspelled as “Amitai.”
One passage claims, “the Lobby has an easier time in poor districts and in states with fewer Jewish inhabitants, where Middle East issues are of even less interest to constituents than elsewhere. For example, Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), who represents the Bronx—the poorest district in the country—aligns himself completely with and is strongly supported by Israel’s Lobby.” Actually Torres’s district includes the neighborhood of Riverdale, which has a Jewish population estimated in the tens of thousands, enough to support several synagogues, a kosher Chinese restaurant, and a Jewish day school that has a strong relationship with Torres.
Another passage claims, “The idea of transforming the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Muslim-majority country of 93 million, into an ally and returning it to a non-Islamic imperial past was advanced in an Instagram post two weeks into the war by Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s influential wife. It depicted two lions leaning against each other and gazing into the future, one wrapped in the flag of Israel, the other in the flag of the Pahlavi shahs.” The flag in question featured a lion and a sun and has centuries of resonance in Iranian culture, predating the Pahlavis. And the shahs, while not fanatics, were Muslim, which the authors don’t seem to be aware of.
The book refers to “Timberland founder Sidney Swartz.” Timberland was actually founded by Nathan Swartz.
The book describes Sheldon and Miriam Adelson as “the largest donors by far” in the 2012 election cycle and says they spent $92 million. Actually, a Koch network spent $122 million in 2012, according to the New York Times. There are 15 references to the Adelson family in the index of the book, some covering multiple pages, and no mentions of Koch or of George Soros or of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which pour significant sums into anti-Israel causes.
The book describes Friends of the IDF as a “pro-Israel think tank.” Actually the organization is not a policy research organization but a charity that does things like help provide housing for “lone soldiers” serving in Israel without local family and offer mental health treatment and PTSD therapy dogs to Israeli veterans.
The book refers to “peaceful demonstrations against ICE raids in Los Angeles in 2025” while neglecting to mention that at least three people were recently sentenced or convicted for throwing rocks and chunks of cement and pouring lighter fluid on a police car during the violent riot. This is included in the book, though it is off-topic, as a way of attacking a Trump policy aide who happens to be Jewish and who expressed concern about the violence.
The book claims, “It is Israeli violence against Palestinians that increases antisemitism.” That ignores that antisemitism peaked during the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust, before there was a modern state of Israel or “Palestinians” with a national identity. It also blames the victims of a hateful bias for a bias that is fundamentally irrational. Israel has tried plenty of nonviolent ways of dealing with the Palestinians—a border fence, unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Iron Dome, the Oslo Accords. Yet when faced with dedicated Islamist fanatical terrorists determined to wipe Israel off the map and rape, kill, or kidnap the Jewish inhabitants, the demand that Israel restrict its responses to nonviolent ones seems more a symptom of antisemitism than an indication of concern about fueling it.
The book accuses Israel of “the obsessive use of ‘terrorist’ as an adjective.” Actually Israel frequently uses “terrorist” as a noun, because, unfortunately, it is fighting a lot of enemies who are terrorists, a fact this book is determined to minimize.
The authors and their editors seem ignorant on foreign policy and national security issues even beyond the Middle East. They claim, “[b]etween Truman and George H.W. Bush, every American adopted containment as their grand geopolitical strategy.” That ignores President Reagan’s shift beyond containment to rollback, the strategy that eventually yielded victory.
One could go on. Throughout there’s a single-minded obsession with donors and interest groups that favor a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, and neglect of the countervailing donors and interest groups. It amounts to a skewed story. The Anti-Defamation League’s antisemitism statistics are dismissed as a “hoax,” downplaying or ignoring FBI or New York Police crime statistics that show similar surges in anti-Jewish hate.
The interesting question is how and why a book this gross and full of falsehoods found a mainstream publisher—One Signal, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by KKR. The chairman of Qatar Investment Authority, Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al-Thani, met with Co-Chief Executive Officer of KKR & Co. Scott Nuttall in July during a visit to New York, according to a photo released by the government of Qatar. The acknowledgments say, “This book benefited from the generous support provided by Lina and Ali.”
Who are Lina and Ali? What sort of “support” did they provide? And why not be fully transparent about it? Eli Clifton’s author photo on the book jacket is provided “Courtesy of the Quincy Institute,” an institution that lists Clifton as “cofounder and senior adviser.” Quincy also lists Ali Munir & Lina Lazaar as donors in the $100,000 to $250,000 category (the same level as the Soros Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund but a lower level than Koch’s Stand Together Trust).
With the last names available, so is more information. The Charity Commission of England and Wales lists Ali Munir as one of three trustees of Ibraaz, a London-based cultural center whose website describes it as “an initiative of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation.” The president of the Kamel Lazaar foundation is Lina Lazaar; the website describes it as “a Geneva- and Tunis-based institution.” Lina’s father is Kamel Lazaar, a Tunisian-Swiss investment banker. Her ex-husband, Hassan Jameel, is a Saudi Arabian billionaire. Corporate registration documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon from the Jersey Islands, the offshore jurisdiction where Munir’s Panarae Limited company is based, indicate he is a British national and his full name is Mohammad Ali Munir Ahmed.
There are plenty of foreign powers whose grip is on display here, but Israel is not among them. As I said, it’s nauseating. Lina and Ali should ask for a refund. This book is so shoddy it will damage their reputation to be associated with it. No wonder they didn’t want their full names in the acknowledgments.
Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power
by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick
One Signal Publishers, 304 pp., $29
Ira Stoll is a senior writer at the Washington Free Beacon.
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