The Guardian published an essay (“The pro-Israel lobby has swayed US presidents since Truman. It must end with Trump,” Aug. 2) adapted from the soon-to-be published book co-written by Eli Clifton, a co-founder of the Quincy Institute, and Ian Lustick, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
To remove any doubt about the premise of the book excerpted by the Guardian, their conspiratorial persuasion is made clear in the title:
The Guardian’s promotion of a book evincing racist tropes about Jerusalem’s putative control of Washington is another illustration of the outlet’s continuing willingness to trade in antisemitic calumnies once assigned to the extremist fringes. Indeed, the fact that the Hamas-affiliated propaganda sheet Quds Network reposted the Guardian article on X is just more evidence of the institution’s moral rot.
Beyond the headline, the book’s synopsis provides more insight into authors’ familiar Protocols of the Elder of Zion-adjacent tale of a small cabal of disloyal American Jews exerting puppet-like control over hapless US presidents, while also squelching basic Constitutional freedoms:
The Guardian’s excerpt from the book begins in May 14, 1948, where it evidently all went wrong.
That’s the date when the US recognised Israel, with President Truman allegedly succumbing to the pressures of “Zionist lobbyists,” as well as powerful “Zionist sympathizers” in New York – that is, “powerful” Jews in the state who were, we’re told, threatening to vote for Truman’s Republican opponent in the upcoming presidential election.
In addition to the authors’ evocation of discredited, toxic canards about Jewish power and influence (Jews made up 3% of the US population in 1948), and their discounting of other factors influencing the president’s recognition, such as moral principle, the framing risibly suggests that it was the first time in American history that a president considered the electoral impact of a policy decision.
The heroes in the authors’ tale are Truman’s advisors who cautioned against recognition, which they feared “would trigger war in the Middle East,” a perfect illustration of how those who wish Israel had never been born insist on erasing the decisions and actions of Palestinians and Arabs from the equation.
The word “trigger” falsely suggests that the war was a naturally occurring phenomenon, rather than the result of a malevolent decision by five Arab states to invade and annihilate the nascent Jewish state – three years after six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
The authors go on to argue that Truman, like his predecessors, caved to the powerful Israel lobby and betrayed the U.S. “national interest”—an ideal that Israel lobby conspiracists like Clifton and Lustik fancy themselves uniquely equipped to define, while framing Jews and other supporters of Israel as intrinsically ill-equipped to delineate.
Also true to character, the authors frame the lobby as the biggest obstacle to peace, erasing decades of Palestinian terrorism and peace rejectionism. It’s also supremely dishonest for two ideologues both hostile to the right of Israel to continue existing as a Jewish state – within any borders – to feign passion for a negotiated solution to the conflict.
Indeed, a review of Clifton’s X timeline during the first few days after the Oct. 7 attacks clearly suggests not only that he had little if any sympathy for murdered, raped and tortured Jews, but that he sympathized with Hamas.
Elsewhere in the Guardian excerpt, the authors make use of their faux nationalist authority to take thinly veiled swipes at American Jews, promoting the dual loyalty canard – a framing of Jews as inherently untrustworthy and disloyal to their own countries that’s been leveraged by anti-Semites for centuries to incite antisemitic violence.
For instance, former US Mid-East peace negotiator Dennis Ross (who’s Jewish) is dismissed in the book as a peace obstructionist due to his record as a “a lobby insider.” This false accusation was first peddled in the widely ridiculed 2006 book on the Israel lobby by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter of whom later blurbed a book by Gilad Atzmon described by the Community Security Trust as “probably the most antisemitic book published in [the UK] in recent years.”
Indeed, the only characters in the Israeli-Palestinian debate whose motivations and actions are questioned or examined are Jews and others involved in pro-Israel lobbying groups.
True to form, Clifton and Lustik are unconcerned with the decisions, ideologies and loyalties of the diplomatic elite (aka, the peace processors) whose assumptions about the conflict’s root cause have continually been proven false, radicalised pro-Palestinian groups, some of whom openly support the murder of diaspora Jews, and Muslim Americans, who demonstrate a distressing level of support for Hamas.
The Guardian’s endorsement of the authors’ mono-casual Jewish and Israel-focused explanation for the continuing Mid-East conflict – a narrative which has been echoed repeatedly by the outlet’s own anti-AIPAC reporter Chris McGreal – is a microcosm of their coverage of the region, which denies agency to Palestinian leaders – no matter how destructive, and inimical to peace their decisions, while assigning all of the blame to Israel.
Finally, the authors appear to completely ignore the single most consequential event for anyone purportedly writing about Israeli-Palestinian peace today: Hamas’ barbaric massacre in southern Israel 34 months ago.
As the renowned historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, a supporter of the two-state solution whose new book on the Middle East comes out in September, recently observed, the terror group’s decision to launch that attack “prevented any creation of a Palestinian state for the foreseeable future,” a timeframe he clarified as meaning “decades.”
Indeed, evidence abounds that Hamas’ only guiding passion has been, and remains, the annihilation of Israel, regardless of the human cost to the two plus million Palestinians in Gaza.
Palestinian-American peace activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib documented that Hamas itself acknowledged that, as far back as 2014, Gaza was offered billions of dollars (US) in development, which included an airport, a seaport, new industries, major cash infusions and self-rule. The condition for this path forward was Gaza’s disarmament and demilitarization, a deal which would have given Hamas an off‑ramp: integrating its former fighters into the civilian police, and shifting toward nation‑building instead of terror.
As Alkahatib, one of the architects of the Gaza development plan, said, Hamas rejected the plan.
Instead, he noted, they “turned the territory into a fortress of violence, tunnels, rockets, smuggling, and radicalization,” which culminated in Oct. 7, “Gaza’s vast devastation, tens of thousands killed, and billions wasted,” a wanton act of destruction that Jewish lobbyists in Washington had absolutely nothing to do with.
The path forward for Gaza, Alkhatib concludes, requires introspection, accountability, responsibility, and an insistence on Palestinian agency – ideas and values that the territory’s leadership, Western pro-Palestinian activists, anti-Israel media outlets and Israel lobby obsessives like Clifton and Lustik are loath to consider.