USreal: Who Is Really In Charge?

A look at how Zionism has taken over our politics and policy in the United States

Thanks to your support we have hit 3,000 subscribers!

With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

---

For my readers who have been living under a rock, New York City had a mayoral primary last week in which disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo was head to head with Muslim Democratic Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani won handily and the attacks from liberals and conservatives alike went into overdrive. What has been so striking about this race, from my perspective, is just how much the mainstream has tried to revolve the entire election around Israel, Mamdani’s position on Israel, and the apartheid state’s “right to exist”, seemingly to the exclusion of any actual conversations about policies for New Yorkers. The absurdity of it caused me to reflect on the stranglehold support for Israel has on the politics of the United States, to the point where it becomes the sole focus of even local elections. The antisemitic trope about a “Zionist occupied government” has gotten a lot more purchase recently from people who cannot make heads or tails of this Israel obsession, while the counter-narrative is that we only support Israel because it’s in our strategic interests to do so. I decided to dig into this question because I don’t think either explanation is sufficient to explain the downright bizarre relationship the United States has to this little colony. Political support for Israel often goes directly against our strategic interests, but Israel could not survive without us. It is undeniable that for the most part, what the Israel lobby wants, the Israel lobby gets. It is undeniable that this nation has wounded itself to protect Israel time and time again. It is undeniable that the support for Israel in Congress does not remotely reflect popular will. But what is the real story? And how did the “special relationship” Israel enjoys come into being?

A lot of the unconditional US support for Israel stems (as many things do) from anti-communism. After Israel’s Nakba and establishment in 1948, the United States saw Israel as a Cold War ally in the region. During the Six-Day war in 1967, The Soviet Union largely backed Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq against Israel, arming the Arab countries involved and launching a media campaign dubbing Zionism a ‘world threat’. This cemented US support for Israel as an anti-communist bulwark in the region.

“Israeli ruling circles and the Western powers blamed the USSR for encouraging its Arab clients to threaten Israel with an act of aggression. Comrades, needless to say this is a complete falsification of the objectives of Soviet diplomacy. We have helped these progressive regimes in the Arab world and will continue to help them in the future. We have supported them not in the least because we share their view that Israel must be destroyed. These progressive regimes need our help to consolidate their independence and defend themselves against imperialist aggression” - On Soviet Policy following the Israeli Aggression in the Middle East, L. I. Brezhnev To The Plenum Of The Central Committee Of The Soviet Communist Party,
20 June 1967

While the Israel-US relationship was solidifying, the US lobby for Israel started in earnest. Initially formed to change US policy against selling arms to Israel, the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs - later dubbed AIPAC - was created in 1953 to strengthen and enhance US support for Israel. This lobby is the oldest foreign policy lobby in the United States and the second most powerful, behind the AARP. Through a wide variety of tactics, AIPAC and a plethora of other related PACs, organizations, think tanks, and Jewish community bodies have cemented near universal and unconditional support for Israel in our politics.

To understand how the Israel lobby became the powerful behemoth it is today, it’s important to understand the way it functions, taking a multi-pronged approach to securing support that ranges from simple campaign donations and influence peddling, to astroturf, spying, doxxing, smears, and even outright blackmail.

Israel Everywhere

In the soft power campaign to secure support for Israel, the Israel lobby has many tools in its tool belt that go well beyond donations to politicians. Aspiring pro-Israel activists are often trained in bootcamps by the Israel lobby and placed on campuses, in think tanks, and in media institutions to help shape much of the public narrative around Israel. On campus, organizations such as CAMERA, Stand With Us (funded by billionaires like Sheldon Adelson), and the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) coordinate directly with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs (MSA) which reports directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, work to keep campuses pro-Israel and to spy on and intimidate anti-Zionist orgs like Students for Justice in Palestine. It was even revealed that on campus activists coordinate directly with Israel who then coordinate with big donors and influential Zionists in the US to carry out covert campaigns to intimidate students and staff who speak up against Israel. In the media, Israeli-lobby-trained individuals pen op-eds, coordinate fake virality by getting certain hashtags trending, lobby media outlets to get headlines that are critical of Israel softened or changed. An investigation recently uncovered that many of those trained on campus by the Israel lobby go on to work for in mainstream newsrooms like MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News. Hundreds of former Israel lobbyists are now producers of the news that most Americans receive on Israel-Palestine. This goes a long way to explain why the coverage of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been so favorable to Israel, to the point of even outright lying to protect the image of the settler colony.

One of the most powerful arms of the Israel lobby’s influence is in American Jewish cultural institutions like synagogue networks, Hillel On Campus, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the Anti-Defamation League. Nearly all of the mainstream Jewish cultural institutions in the U.S. are pro-Israel, and a lot of effort is spent to keep it that way. Even mild dissent within these institutions against Israel is met with purges. According to Rebecca Vilkomerson, co-director of pro-Palestine philanthropic project Funding Freedom, “liberal Zionist funders, which often funded progressive or left organizations across many issue areas, are now imposing litmus tests over using words like ​‘genocide’ through funding cuts, threatening cuts, or quiet non-renewals”. Through their well-funded donor networks like the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish Funders Network, and of course, AIPAC, the Israel lobby is able to flood the zone with its soldiers in every facet of life to maintain the US-Israel relationship and thwart anyone who speaks out against it.

Extralegal and Illegal Means

Soft power is far from being the only means to influence American policy towards Israel. Over the last 60 years Israel has utilized a variety of underhanded tactics to maintain support. Israel has admitted to spying on American citizens through various shadow orgs and even through Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. From pro-Palestine student activists to our politicians, Israel maintains reams of documents on anyone deemed to be a sufficient threat to their interests. This is the second order strategy when bribery and influence peddling do not work. On campus, an undercover investigation by Al Jazeera that was buried but subsequently leaked by Electronic Intifada showed that doxxing and harassment are standard fare to intimidate pro-Palestine activists, one of the lobbyists stating, “With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective, what we found at least in the last year, is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted Facebook ads.”

A prime example of this intimidation racket is in the shadowy group that works closely with both the Israel lobby and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs called Canary Mission. This group runs a database that contains the the personal and professional details of students, professors, and organizations who speak up against Israel. From The Nation, “[Canary Mission is] a massive blacklisting and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous charges against them—charges designed to embarrass and humiliate them and damage their future employability. All secretly funded by wealthy Jewish Americans and Jewish American foundations”. Though the organization has taken great pains to obscure its funding sources, The Forward revealed in 2018 that they are funded in large part by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco. Worse, much of the funds sent to Canary Mission are tax exempt, meaning U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for this McCarthyite blacklist. For example, the Helen Diller Family Foundation earmarked $100,000 of tax-exempt funds for Canary Mission through the Central Fund of Israel, a New York-based charity. In fact, there are a variety of sham “charitable organizations” that currently exploit this loophole to allow American Zionists to fund Israeli settlements and extremists without and do so tax-free. Incidentally, this is something that Not On Our Dime, a bill that was championed in 2023 by Zohran Mamdani, has sought to rectify.

Beyond doxxing, outright illegal spying on Americans has long been a fundamental part of the operation to keep the U.S. pro-Israel. Recently, in a viral interview Tucker Carlson did with Ted Cruz, Cruz admits that he’s aware of Mossad spying on U.S. citizens, but asserts that it’s okay because “every one of our friends spies on us”.

This is nothing new. It was revealed in 1993 that the ADL had used its spy network to collect documents on a staggering 12,000 individuals and 950 organizations who were considered a threat to Israel through their activism, and further sold a lot of this information to apartheid South African intelligence. There were even allegations that the FBI had used ADL’s spies to indirectly funnel information back to the agency that was illegal for the FBI to collect themselves.

Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps one of the most prominent people with alleged ties to Israeli intelligence. According to some sources, Epstein created a honeypot operation where he would lure prominent political figures into a "honey trap", providing them with underage girls for sexual gratification and then using photos of these encounters to blackmail the figures into supporting Israeli interests.

The Money

Of course, the most obvious and front-facing piece of the influence of the Israel lobby is their constant meddling in elections and their generous bribes to politicians. Nearly all of Congress has benefitted from pro-Israel money in one way or another. Those who speak out against Israel can expect to receive a well-funded primary challenger that will promise not to disrupt the US-Israel “special relationship”. In 2024, both Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their seats to pro-Israel challengers, with AIPAC’s arm DMFI spending a record $20 million to oust the candidates. In 2024 alone, AIPAC, DMFI, and JStreet spent a total of $58 million in election donations with only 33 members of Congress receiving no pro-Israel donations at all. Even where a member of Congress doesn’t take Israel money directly, the threat of an AIPAC-funded primary challenge is often enough to buy their silence.

“Congressmen don’t do anything unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money.” says an AIPAC lobbyist captured during Al Jazeera’s undercover investigation. When it comes to the seeming unlimited support for the genocide in Gaza, according to co-author of the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer, “If there was no lobby pushing Congress in a particular direction in a really forceful way, the position of the U.S. Congress on the war in Gaza would be fundamentally different”.

Who’s the Boss?

Oversimplified explanations of the US-Israel relationship in either direction that don’t take into account the massive impact the Israeli lobby has on our politics, nor the strategic importance of the settler colony, don’t do the discussion justice. Israel is of extreme significance to the United States and functions as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East that helps us influence and control the region. The only reason AIPAC and others are allowed to run their operations the way they do is because we consider Israel vital to our interests.

On the other hand, through years of subterfuge and billions of dollars, the lobby has been able to worm its way into every facet of public life and keep support for Israel within our institutions so ironclad that the U.S. has damaged its own reputation on the world stage and the very concept of international law to protect it. While the support of the public for Israel in the U.S. has never been lower, for most of Congress, for nearly all of the media, for our institutions and universities, support for Israel is unconditional and everlasting, regardless of backlash.

The synthesis is of these contradictions is that the U.S. has ultimate control via funding and diplomatic protection of Israel, but the long leash we have given Israel for so long has created a situation of mutually assured destruction. Israel will act directly against the U.S. if it needs to, even as it needs us to survive. The U.S.-Israel relationship is not a partnership of equals - it is a colonial arrangement forged in anti-communism and wrapped in the language of shared values, sustained by a lobby that operates with ubiquity and near-impunity. Israel depends on American largesse to survive, yet through decades of infiltration, bribery, blackmail, extortion, and coercion, its advocates have made dissent politically untenable. The result is a grotesque inversion of democracy: a foreign policy so unmoored from public opinion that even a genocide cannot shake its foundations. But as the gap between elite consensus and popular outrage widens, these sharpening contradictions are becoming unsustainable. The question is no longer why this "special relationship" persists, but how much longer a system built on lies, blackmail, and bloodshed can hold - and what it will take to finally break its grip.

---

Thanks for reading! I am a 100% crowd-funded writer. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider upgrading to a paying membership here. Make sure to subscribe so you can get the latest right in your inbox. If you aren’t able to financially support this project, sharing it with a friend goes a long way. It is your support that makes this project possible. - Scarlet