AIPAC-Aligned Donors Poured Money Into 2026 Primaries as Book Ties $1.7 Billion to Nine Israel-Focused Billionaires

In a recent episode of the podcast Always at War, hosts Alex Jordan and Courtney Rawlings sit down with journalist Eli Clifton and University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick to walk through the findings of their new book, "Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of Foreign Power." The two authors lay out, in plain campaign-finance terms, how a narrow network of donors has come to shape which candidates survive competitive primaries.

Clifton says he and Lustick identified nine billionaires for whom, in his words, Israel is "the driving motivation for their engagement in American politics." Together, according to Clifton, that group has given more than $1.7 billion in campaign contributions.

The book points to two 2026 races as case studies. AIPAC's affiliated Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, backed a challenger who unseated Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a persistent critic of Israel policy, in what the authors describe as the most expensive House primary in the country's history. A comparable effort failed in Michigan's Senate primary, the second most expensive Senate primary on record, when Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens. Clifton notes that an unusually large share of the money in that Michigan race came from out-of-state donors with a history of giving mostly to Republicans, a detail he says illustrates how disconnected the spending was from local politics.

Lustick argues the lobby's reach now extends past electoral spending into speech itself. He says AIPAC-aligned groups have pushed to restrict campus debate because Israeli government policy has grown harder to defend on the merits.

"So it attacks American freedoms to try to suppress debate, intimidate dissidents and break the institutions that produce those dissidents," Lustick said on the podcast.

That claim is Lustick's characterization, not an independently adjudicated finding, and it remains contested by defenders of the lobby's campus advocacy.

Clifton frames the current spending surge as defensive. With Israel's favorability sliding in both parties, he says pro-Israel donors are less interested in winning public opinion than in locking policy commitments in place before opinion shifts further.

"They're trying to figure out how you lock in the United States," Clifton said.

The book updates a line of scholarship that stretches back to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's 2007 study of the Israel lobby, but its focus is narrower and more current: named primaries, dated spending, and a short list of billionaire donors whose giving records are traceable through FEC filings. Occupation Watch was unable to independently verify the $1.7 billion figure or the nine-donor count from the excerpted material alone; both are attributed to Clifton's research in the book and podcast interview.