As the Israel lobby in the US weakens, its UK counterpart grows more fearsome

Some of the lobby's power operates at the level of assumption about what Jewish donors expect in return for their money. According to the NYT, some three-quarters of all donations over $500,000 to the major political-action committee supporting Democratic nominees for the US Senate race in 2018 were made by Jews.

Though many of those donors may not rate Israel as their main cause, a former Clinton campaign aide noted that the recipients of this largesse necessarily tailor their foreign-policy positions so as not to antagonise such donors. As a result, candidates avoid even the mild criticism of Israel adopted by Bernie Sanders, the Democratic party's challenger to Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

"There's no major donor that I can think of who is looking for someone to take a Bernie-like approach," said the aide. Sanders raised his campaign funds from small donations rather these major funders, leaving him freer to speak openly about Israel.

Other insiders are more explicit still. Ben Rhodes, a former confidant of Barack Obama, says the lobby effectively tied Obama's hand's domestically on efforts to promote peace. "The Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class," he told Thrall, adding: "The donor class is profoundly to the right of where the activists are, and frankly, where the majority of the Jewish community is."

Joel Rubin, a former political director at lobby group J Street and a founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, concurred: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters. It's more about donors now."

All of these insiders are stating that the expectations of major donors shape candidates' US foreign policy positions in line with Israel's interests, not necessarily US interests. It is hard not to interpret that as reformulation of "dual loyalty".

What's so significant about the NYT article is that it signals, as did the muted furor over Omar's comments, that the pro-Israel lobby is weakening. No powerful lobby, including the Israel one, wants to be forced out of the shadows. It wants to remain in the darkness, where it can most comfortably exercise its influence without scrutiny or criticism.

The pro-Israel lobby's loyalty to Israel is no longer unmentionable. But it is also not unique.

As Mondoweiss recently noted, Hannah Arendt, the Jewish scholar and fugitive from Nazi Germany, pointed to the inevitability of the "double loyalty conflict" in her 1944 essay "Zionism Reconsidered", where she foreshadowed the rise of a pro-Israel lobby and its potential negative impacts on American Jews. It was, she wrote, "an unavoidable problem of every national movement of a people living within the boundaries of other states and unwilling to resign their civil and political rights therein."

For that reason, the US-Cuban lobby has an obvious dual loyalty problem too. It's just that, given the Cuban lobby's priority is overthrowing the Cuban government, a desire shared in Washington, the issue is largely moot.

In Israel's case, however, there is a big and growing gap between image and reality. On the one hand, Washington professes a commitment to peace-making and a promise to act as an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians. And on the other, the reality is it has offered full-throated support for a series of ultra-nationalist Israeli governments determined to destroy any hope of peace and swallow up the last vestiges of a potential Palestinian state.

It's important to point out, however, that advocates for Israel are not only Jews. While the pro-Israel lobby represents the views of a proportion of Jewish Americans, it is also significantly comprised of Christians, evangelicals in particular.

Millions of these Christians including Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can be accused of dual loyalty too. They regard Israel's role in Biblical prophecy as far more important than the future of the US, or mankind for that matter.

For many of these evangelicals, bringing about the end of the world by ensuring Jews return to their Biblical homeland triggering a final reckoning at the Battle of Armageddon is the fulfilment of God's will. And if it's a choice between support for Washington's largely secular elites and support for God, they know very definitely where they stand.

Again, the NYT has started to shine a light on the strange role of Israel in the US political constellation. Another recent article reminded readers that in 2015 Pompeo spoke of the end-times struggle phrophesied to take place in Israel, or what is often termed by evangelicals as "The Rapture". He said: "We will continue to fight these battles."

During his visit last month to Israel, he announced that the Trump administration's work was "to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains. I am confident that the Lord is at work here."

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