Talk:
“Israel’s Lobby in America: Damaging, Dangerous, and Desperate”
by
Ian S. Lustick
Department of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
ilustick@sas.upenn.edu
Date: Monday, October 19, 2026
Time: 4:30 p.m. / Zoom meeting
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.
Abstract
In his Farewell Address to Congress George Washington observed that the new American
polity was dangerously vulnerable to any domestic faction with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. Such a faction would have no natural opponent to balance its influence in Congress or over the Executive. Foreign policy toward that country would therefore be greatly distorted, leading to unnecessary and costly adventures abroad and the misallocation of national resources. Israel firsters in the United States have have proven Washington correct. President after President was forced to abandon diplomatic initiatives that might well have solved or greatly ameliorated the Arab-Israeli conflict because of furious opposition by the Israel Lobby. Known in Washington political circles as an “800 pound gorilla” the Lobby was able to force Presidents into choosing between pressuring Israel toward peace and losing an election or losing control of their legislative agenda. Changes in world politics, Israel’s transformation into a kind of “crazy state,” and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow ultrawealthy individuals to pour virtually limitless amounts of money into political campaigns, have greatly expanded the threat posed by the Lobby. In addition to damage to U.S. foreign policy and national security interests associated with the Lobby-enforced principle of “no daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, Americans,
and American civil society as a whole, face threats to basic freedoms arising from an
antisemitism witch hunt against critics of Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel. Yes, public
opinion in America is changing, but the gap between what the people want and what
politicians in Washington do remains.
Short Bio
Ian S. Lustick is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania
and holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair. Professor Lustick received his BA from Brandeis
University in 1971 and his PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley
in 1976. Before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, he taught for
fifteen years at Dartmouth College. He has worked as an analyst on Israel-Palestinian affairs in the United States Department of State, and served as a consultant on Middle East policy and on national security and intelligence issues for most of the relevant agencies of the U.S. government. He has also done extensive work in the fields of social science methodology, political forecasting, and agent-based computer simulation modeling. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founder and past President of the Association for Israel Studies, and past President of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Carnegie Corporation. His dozens of articles have appeared in the leading journals of political science, Middle East affairs, and public policy. Among his books are Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority (1980); For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (1988, 1994); Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (1993); and Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (2019). His most recent book, co-authored with Eli Clifton, is titled Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power.