The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, America's most prominent pro-Israeli lobbying group, with roughly 70 years of history strengthening ties between the United States and Israel. It does not receive money from foreign governments, including Israel's; it relies on donations from Americans, many of them Jewish. It regularly attracts senior Democrats and Republicans to its conferences.
In the decade to 2021 AIPAC devoted a mere $157,000 to election spending, a rounding error compared with its lobbying bill of $31m. Over the past two electoral cycles, however, AIPAC spent $65m on elections and just $9m on lobbying—a strategic pivot from shaping policy minutiae to fighting to keep friendly congressmen in their seats. The shift reflects the erosion of once-bipartisan support for Israel in American politics. Alarmed by the election of several harsh critics of Israel in 2018, AIPAC moved aggressively into electoral politics. In 2022 it launched the United Democracy Project, a super PAC allowed to raise unlimited funds. After spending just $150,000 on races in the previous decade, it deployed $100m in the 2022 and 2024 election cycles.
In 2026 AIPAC has poured more than $30m into Democratic primaries, focusing on House races in New Jersey, North Carolina and Illinois. It has set up proxy groups with anodyne names whose ads do not mention Israel. The results have been mixed, and top Democrats have begun swearing off AIPAC money.
The share of Americans who view Israel favourably has fallen in recent years, hitting a near-40-year low in February 2026 according to Gallup. An Economist/YouGov poll found that one in three Americans said the pro-Israel lobby wields too much influence over the government. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy", published nearly two decades ago and once widely dismissed, has resurfaced as a bestseller. Joe Kent, who resigned as head of the National Counterterrorism Centre, claimed that Donald Trump had been "duped" into starting the Iran war by "Israel and its powerful American lobby".
"The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut."