New Book Tracks AIPAC's $70 Million Fundraising Arm and Pollard's Return to Israel on an Adelson Jet

Jonathan Pollard, the former US Navy intelligence analyst convicted in the mid-1980s of spying for Israel, left Newark Airport for Tel Aviv in December 2020 aboard a Boeing 737 owned by Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson. He had been released from parole restrictions the month before. At Ben Gurion Airport, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was there to greet him.

That scene opens Israel's Lobby, published in mid-August by investigative journalist Eli Clifton and political scientist Ian Lustick. The book uses Pollard's homecoming, and his subsequent public championing of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, as the entry point into a documented examination of the money and organizing networks that shape US policy toward Israel.

"A spy being lifted out of the country on a billionaire's private jet sounds like a scene from a John le Carré novel. But this took place with open transparency, in the full glare of the world's media," Clifton told The New Arab.

Clifton, a cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Lustick, who served as the State Department's Israel-Palestine expert under President Carter, define the lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and organizations working to push US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction, with roots reaching into evangelical Christian politics, organized labor, and the neoconservative movement.

The book's clearest documentary material concerns AIPAC. In the 2022 tax year, its primary fundraising vehicle, the American Israel Education Foundation, reported revenues of approximately $69.9 million and held assets exceeding $186 million, according to tax filings cited in the book. Lustick calls AIPAC "unquestionably the most successful foreign policy lobby in the United States." The authors point to a July 2023 congressional resolution, passed with AIPAC-aligned backing, pledging continued aid to Israel and declaring the country "neither racist nor an apartheid state" as an example of the lobby's legislative reach.

On the Anti-Defamation League, the authors' claims move from documented finance into disputed interpretation. Clifton and Lustick argue the ADL has broadened its definition of antisemitism to classify criticism of Israeli military or government conduct as antisemitic incidents, and that the Biden White House's May 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism relied heavily on ADL's own audit data. The ADL disputes this characterization of its definitions; the extent of the strategy document's reliance on ADL figures was not independently verified for this article.

Lustick also described a personal encounter with pressure tactics. While promoting the book at a church in suburban Philadelphia, hosted by a group called the Jewish Justice Collective, he said the venue "was subjected to demands from lobby representatives requesting the event be cancelled." Neither the identity of those representatives nor the church's name were detailed in the source material.

The authors' broadest claim, that the lobby's influence has produced speech restrictions "unmatched since the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period," is their own characterization and is not supported in the book excerpt with specific documented incidents beyond the Philadelphia episode. It stands as the authors' argument, not an established fact.