The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Summary

• The book is split into two parts with the first giving a general overview of U.S foreign policy, a brief origin of Israel and whether Israel is an asset to the United States.
• The book shows that ever since around the 1950s Israel has been getting billions of dollars in aid per year along with loans from american banks at good rates and many other benefits with the aid increasing in times of war. Israel is also shown to prioritize itself even if it harms the United States like when it bought U.S weapons and sold them to China or the general idea that the main cause for terrorism against the U.S. is due to the general opinion in arab countries of the U.S. as a "devil" due to it's association with Israel and that being the main cause of 9/11.
• The book also goes through the main Israel lobby, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) which facilitates, encourages and basically forces the american government to help Israel unconditionally. Though the lobby doesn't fund congressional candidates itself or get funded directly from Israel it helps connect congressional candidates which it sees as having positive views on Israel and connects them with wealthy jewish american donors. The lobby also fights against candidates who are against Israel by funding their opposition with many multiples of dollars. Thus this is why Congress and the House always vote in favour of Israel, as any candidate who votes against will basically lose their rank and be called either a 'self hating jew' if they're jewish or 'antisemetic' if they aren't.
• The Lobby also tries to control the media and colleges to favour Israel with it funding movies and t.v shows that shine a positive light on Israel, preventing books and papers that are against Israel from getting published (this book is an example of this) and even tried to pass a law that prevents universities from hiring proffessors that are critical to Israel's actions.
• The second half of the book goes over Israel's influence in specific conflicts like the Iraq war, Syria, Iran and Lebanon.
• The narrative for Iraq, Syria and Iran is similar with Israel essentially baiting the U.S. to go to war with these countries by significantly overstating their military strength and saying that they had weapons of mass desctruction (WMD) that posed a threat to the mainland U.S. even though none of these countries had this capability or even intended to, at most they had missiles capable of hitting just Israel.
• Then the book goes over the Second Lebanon war with Israel against Hezbollah showing that in the first war from 1982-2000 Israel failed to defeat hezbollah in eighteen years of conflict and after the ceasefire the public opinion of Hezbollah improved greatly. Though in the second war which started in 2006 due to a minor skirmish where some Hezbollah soldiers captured and killed several Israeli soldiers Israel responded by killing one thousand civillians, wounding 6,000 and displacing a quarter of a million people. Even though all human rights groups and almost all countries condemned Israel it still continued killing civillians unnecessarily, dropping cluster bombs on cities and destroying key infrastructure.
• Though I found it weird that the book barely mentioned any terrirost attacks commited by Palestinian groups and the Munich Olympics issue and other stuff like that. The book also didn't mention how these conflicts compared to other conflicts in regions other than the middle east like the afghanistan war.

Notes