I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
A new poll from The Economist/YouGov found that a majority of registered US voters support impeaching US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, after Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) of Kentucky introduced a resolution to remove him.
The poll, conducted from September 18 to September 21, found that 51% of registered voters surveyed support impeaching Hegseth for starting the war with Iran without congressional authorization, while 34% oppose it. Support for impeachment rises among likely voters to 54%, and opposition rises to 35%.
“This is why [House Speaker Mike Johnson] adjourned Congress to avoid the vote and why the President isn’t defending [Hegseth],” Massie wrote on X in response to the results.
Hegseth before the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 21, 2026 (Pentagon photo)
Massie introduced the articles of impeachment on September 15, and because it was a privileged resolution, a vote had to happen within two days. But Johnson canceled the House’s voting session for September 17, sending lawmakers home early for a long recess that pushes the impeachment vote until after midterm elections.
Impeachment is much more popular among Democrats, with the YouGov poll showing 77% supporting it compared to just 22% of Republicans. But Massie only needs a few Republican votes to pass the impeachment resolution through the House, and seven House Republicans supported the latest War Powers Resolution calling for an end to the war with Iran, signaling that he may get enough.
While the poll asked only about Hegseth’s role in the Iran war, Massie’s eight articles of impeachment also address how Hegseth has ignored US laws designed to mitigate civilian casualties, his role in extrajudicial executions at sea (strikes on alleged drug-running boats), the attack on Venezuela to abduct President Maduro, the bombing campaign in Yemen last year, and his efforts to chill free speech.
President Donald Trump speaks to the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, at the UN headquarters. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]
US President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that he is deciding whether to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” of Iran and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival.”
The American president asked: “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
Trump’s murderous language marks a new stage in the criminalization of imperialist foreign policy amid the eruption of global war. It is without precedent in modern politics outside the discourse of Adolf Hitler’s regime, which waged a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation, against the Soviet Union.
Unlike Trump, however, Hitler did not announce his war of extermination in public. He gave the order in private, to his generals. On March 30, 1941, in a closed meeting with some 200 senior officers, he told them the coming invasion would be a Vernichtungskampf, “a war of extermination,” according to the diary of his army chief of staff, Franz Halder.
The extermination of the population of Iran, which has resisted Trump’s efforts to subjugate the country through war, is in fact being actively discussed at the White House. The journalist Seymour Hersh reported on June 10 that Trump had raised using nuclear weapons against Iran, a country of 93 million people, in a secret meeting with his senior staff.
Trump’s criminal war of aggression against Iran had killed at least 3,468 people and wounded more than 26,500 by June 10, according to Iran’s Health Ministry. Last week, a UN fact-finding mission found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed war crimes,” citing the US missile attack on February 28 on an elementary school in Minab that killed more than 150 people, 120 of them children.
The war against Iran is one component of the US-Israeli onslaught throughout the Middle East, whose highest expression is the genocide in Gaza, which has killed 73,919 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The threat against Iran was one item in a series. Trump boasted that the US military had penetrated “deep into the Venezuelan capital” and “arrested” Maduro, and that the reward was “the largest oil deal in history,” 65 billion barrels. “To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump declared. Cuba “is an absolutely failed state … and it will fall.” Greenland is to pass under the “permanent control” of the United States, with two “very major military bases.”
During Trump’s speech, only the delegations of Iran and Cuba, whose government Trump threatened to overthrow, left the hall in protest. The representatives of the European imperialist powers, for all their constant talk of democracy and human rights, sat there and did nothing. Khalilur Rahman, the Bangladeshi foreign minister who presides over the Assembly, thanked the American president.
The UN Charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, seven weeks after the surrender of Nazi Germany, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”
Its Article 2 binds every member to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Trump’s speech was such a threat, made in the building constructed to outlaw it by the leader of a state almost seven months into an illegal war of aggression. Trump’s speech itself is indictable as a violation of international law.
The European counterpoint to Trump was given Tuesday by French President Emmanuel Macron, who spoke of “the return of imperialism, of arrogance, the return of unrestrained force which knows no rules … A world in which some believe that they can undermine the international order so as to push their borders outwards.”
He added, “War crimes have been industrialized. We’ve seen the destruction of civilian infrastructure, human rights violations.”
But while some commentators took his remarks as a veiled critique of Trump, he never named the American president. Rather, his speech was a vocal and explicit denunciation of Russia and a declaration of intent to continue, alongside Trump, to fund and arm Ukraine.
Macron declared that “Russia has been waging a cruel war on civilians. It’s been occupying the territory of a sovereign state. France will continue providing unstinting support” for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
In Macron’s view, the appropriate response to Russia’s “imperialism” and “war crimes” is for the European imperialist powers to intensify their war against Russia. Macron made no effort to square his claims that the war against Russia is a war for democracy with the fact that Trump, his ally in that war, had just threatened to exterminate the population of an entire country.
In 1920 Lenin described the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, as “a league of mad dogs who are snatching each other’s bones.” The phrase is perhaps somewhat quaint. The UN General Assembly of 2026 is an active planning center for war.
After meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the same day, Macron announced a contract to supply Ukraine with radars and air-defense missiles, the Kyiv Independent reported Tuesday. Trump, for his part, also met Zelensky on Tuesday and confirmed that the manufacture of Patriot air-defense missiles in Ukraine was under discussion.
As the Trump-Zelensky meeting opened, a British reporter told Trump that “a lot of people in the UK are very worried about the mood music from the UK and other European leaders about the inevitability of direct conflict between us and Russia,” and asked: “Can you stop that happening?” Trump refused to give a serious answer.
In fact, Trump’s blood-curdling threats against Iran, and the fact that they provoked no serious protest among the leaders of the imperialist powers, demonstrate the extent to which global war, and its corollary, the extermination of entire populations, has been normalized by world capitalism.
The Democrats are not an alternative to this warmongering. Just days earlier, they had given Trump a blank check to escalate the war not only against Russia but against Iran. On September 16, 58 House Democrats voted for the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which authorizes the president to tax imports from China, India and the other largest purchasers of Russian oil at rates as high as 100 percent and extends for five years the sanctions on Iran’s energy and arms sectors. Thirty-six of the 45 Senate Democrats had voted for it on August 7.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted no because, he said, the bill did not go far enough against Russia: “You have to confront the bully, not appease the bully.” A Democratic majority in Congress after November 3 would take the war further and faster.
The day before his speech, Trump met New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), at Gracie Mansion. Mamdani said nothing about the war and told reporters: “We appreciate the president’s commitment to the city.”
Trump began his speech by boasting of “the golden age of America,” declaring, “The entire world is being lifted by the wealth, strength, spirit, and momentum of a newly energized and a very powerful United States of America.”
In fact, Trump presides over a social order and political system that is rotting on its feet—what Trotsky described on the eve of World War II as “the death agony of capitalism.” The same crisis is producing its opposite: the growth of social opposition, mass protests and global class struggle.
The opposition to Trump’s criminal warmongering will come neither from the European imperialist powers nor from the Democrats and their accomplices in the DSA. It will come from the international working class, armed with the program of international socialism.
Protesters gathered in front of the US State Department demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the US-backed Israeli military operations, and unrestricted humanitarian aid access on July 22, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The vast majority of Democratic voters believe Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza and want its supporters in both parties to face consequences.
The majority of Democratic voters believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza for the past three years. And they want the American politicians in both parties who supported it to pay.
In a poll released on Monday by the Center for Strategic Politics and commissioned by the magazine Liberal Currents, 683 Democratic voters were asked whether the next Democratic administration should “pursue criminal prosecution of members of the Trump and Biden administrations for actions taken related to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
More than half, 57%, of the Democrats surveyed answered “yes,” while only 22% answered “no” and another 22% said they “don’t know.”
Self-described “socialists” and “progressives” were most bullish on Gaza-focused prosecutions. But so were 52% of “liberals” and even 48% of Democrats who called themselves “moderate” or “conservative.”
It is one of several questions in the poll about a hypothetical Democratic administration prosecuting its predecessors over policies considered deadly and destructive.
About two-thirds, 66%, said they wanted to see Trump administration officials prosecuted for actions taken during its aggressive war with Iran, which has led to the deaths of more than 1,700 civilians and wrought economic turmoil.
Nearly three-quarters, 72%, believed Trump officials should face similar accountability for their campaign of extrajudicial strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed more than 234 people in what a top United Nations official recently said may constitute “crimes against humanity.”
And more than three-quarters said they wanted to see Trump officials face legal penalties for actions committed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which have waged a violent mass deportation campaign that has entailed numerous documented due process violations, instances of racial profiling, and several shootings of immigrants and US citizens without clear justification.
The question about Gaza is the only one in the survey in which Democrats were asked about the prospect of prosecuting members of their own party as well as Republicans. And while fewer Democrats ultimately answered yes, it indicates that their ire toward the American politicians supporting the genocide transcends party loyalty.
The poll results come as some activists pursue accountability for the Biden administration in other ways. Last week, organizers launched a campaign to pressure universities and other prominent institutions to cut ties with what they called the “Genocide 20.”
These are officials like former Secretary of State Tony Blinken and former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan who crafted and defended the administration’s policy of unrestricted military aid for Israel despite mounting evidence that it was killing scores of civilians and enacting a campaign of starvation against the people of Gaza.
The United Statesprovided Israel with at least $17.9 billion in military assistance between October 7, 2023, and the end of former President Joe Biden’s term in January 2025, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. During that period, more than 47,000 Palestinians were confirmed killed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, the US has continued to provide Israel with billions of dollars in military assistance, including $3.8 billion in regular annual military aid, while the Trump administration has approved billions more in arms sales and expedited weapons deliveries. The death toll has risen to nearly 74,000, according to official figures, but independent experts have suggested this may be a significant undercount.
According to Monday’s poll, more than 4 in 5 Democrats said that “foreign policy (including Israel and Iran)” is important to them in deciding which candidates to support, compared with just 4% who said it is not.
Foreign policy has been a critical dividing line in several recent Democratic primaries, in which voters have revolted against candidates backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
This includes Democratic Michigan Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who was defeated by Abdul El-Sayed in a contest for the US Senate despite her more than $30 million in backing from AIPAC, which helped to turn it into the most expensive Democratic primary ever.
AIPAC-backed House candidates have similarly suffered high-profile defeats at the hands of progressives calling to cut off US funding for Israel. Some of the victors include Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, and Aisha Wahab, who won a special election in California.
It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits.
It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do.
Many people said we wouldn’t last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong.
Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work.
But here’s the urgent message from me today. It’s never been this bad out there. And it’s never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever.
We don’t accept corporate advertising and never will. We don’t have a paywall because we don’t think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you.
When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we.
Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives?
In March 2006, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” as a “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.”
In their essay, which was the basis of the book of the same name that appeared the next year, Mearsheimer and Walt had been careful to distinguish the Israel lobby from a lobby by and for Jews, but it was to no avail in the furor that the essay and book provoked.
Two decades later, as the United States and Israel wage a senseless war against Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt’s case for the inordinate influence of Israel and the Israel lobby over American foreign policy looks pretty good. So does their contention that the policies promoted by Israel and its lobby are not in America’s interest.
Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist who has documented the lobby’s influence, and Ian Lustick, a retired political scientist and expert on the Middle East, have written a worthy sequel to Mearsheimer and Walt’s book, entitled “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power”. Like Mearsheimer and Walt, they use the term “lobby” to refer to a “loose network” of groups, media outlets, and wealthy individuals. They do an excellent job of explaining how this lobby has grown and altered its approach over the last two decades.
As Clifton and Lustick show, the lobby has changed the way it tries to influence election outcomes. Before the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which opened the door to super-PACs and unlimited contributions, AIPAC and affiliated groups tried to influence elections and elected officials through campaign contributions. But AIPAC itself did not contribute to candidates or officials. Instead, its leadership urged its members, which included the very wealthy, to back certain politicians and to oppose others based on whether they had backed or opposed measures that were in Israel’s interest. Members of the House and Senate committees that oversaw foreign aid could expect generous contributions if they backed aid to Israel. Donors gave these contributions directly to candidates and to sympathetic local PACs like Badger PAC or Gold Coast PAC, which in turn doled them out to candidates.
In the last decade, national groups that support Israel’s government have established their own super PACs that wage independent expenditure campaigns either for or against candidates. In 2019, Mark Mellman founded Democratic Majority for Israel. In 2021, AIPAC founded the United Democracy Project. These committees have spent huge sums. According to Federal Election Commission records, the United Democracy Project has doled out $104 million between January 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026. In August, the UDP alone spent $2.5 million to oppose an Afghan-American candidate, Aisha Wahab, in a runoff for the northern California congressional seat vacated by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.
In the past, wealthy American supporters of Israel’s government also exercised influence as individuals. Businessman Abraham Feinberg was a major funder of Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign, which gained him access to Truman and allowed him to influence Truman’s policy toward the new state of Israel. Feinberg was, however, small potatoes by current standards. During the last decade, what Clifton and Lustick describe as a “small set of megadonors” have backed unconditional support for Israel. Clifton and Lustick highlight nine donors, including Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Yass, Larry Ellison, Haim Saban, the late Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer, who have contributed over $1.7 billion in disclosed contributions since 2012. These contributions, they note, do not include undisclosed “dark money.”
Some of these contributions, like those from the Adelsons, directly affected policy. The Adelsons’ contributions to Donald Trump in 2016 were reportedly based on an understanding that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which he did upon taking office. While AIPAC and the formal lobbies have influenced Congress, the megadonors have specialized in winning over the executive branch.
The groups supportive of Israel’s government have also changed how they have made their case for supporting Israel. When Mearsheimer and Walt were writing their book, the groups could still rely on widespread public support for Israel. If anything, the pro-Israel set in American politics had grown to include Republican evangelicals as well as Democratic liberals. Labeling politicians as “anti-Israel” or “pro-Palestinian” could discredit them. In AIPAC’s successful 1984 campaign to unseat Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.), for instance, one of the groups sent around a mailer describing Percy as “Israel’s worst adversary in Congress.”
But as Israel’s popularity has plummeted in the wake of its disproportionate response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre and to Israel’s continuing expansion in the Palestinian West Bank, the groups have had to resort to deception and diversion against Israel’s critics.
Instead of engaging the arguments of Israel’s critics, groups like the ADL, American Jewish Committee, the Adelson-backed Brandeis Center for Human Rights and Law, and watchdog groups like CAMERA and the Canary Mission began charging Israel’s critics with antisemitism. “Their goal was not to win debates about Israel,” Clifton and Lustick write, “but to prevent discussion about it.” They successfully lobbied the Biden and Trump administrations to endorse an official definition of antisemitism that included criticisms of Israel. The Trump administration used charges of antisemitism to bludgeon liberal universities and law firms they disliked. It would be surprising if Clifton and Lustick escape being charged with antisemitism for exposing the machinations of the Israel lobby.
The groups have also altered their campaign strategy. In their advertising, the UDP and allied PACs have eschewed mention of American policy toward Israel. Instead, they have attacked candidates they opposed by citing their stands on whatever issues might resonate with the relevant electorate. In their ads this year against Wahab, the groups advanced a spurious claim that she had made “teenage girls more vulnerable to predators” by opposing a sex trafficking bill in the state legislature.
In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, AIPAC ran ads claiming that Abdul El-Sayed “disrespected women.” None of the ads mentioned Israel. This tactic seemed to work in 2024 campaigns AIPAC and the groups waged against then-Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), but as the Iran War has deepened discontent with the U.S.-Israel alliance, it failed against Wahab and El-Sayed. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the general election, even requested that AIPAC drop its plans to support him with ads against El-Sayed.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don’t miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.
Invalid emailEnter your email Subscribe
As Clifton and Lustick show, the groups composing the Lobby have seen a sharp growth in their staffs and revenues over the quarter century. AIPAC and its educational foundation enjoyed a “fivefold increase in revenue between 2000 and 2022.” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (an AIPAC spinoff) increased its revenues from $5.2 million in 2001 to $21.9 million in 2023. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which led the charge in 2015 against the Iran nuclear pact, increased its annual haul from $1.12 million in 2001 to $17.8 million in 2022. Along with the megadonors, the Israel groups enjoy the support of wealthy foundations, including the $256 million Koret Foundation and the $220 million Swartz Foundation. But the growth of revenue has not been matched by a growth in influence. If anything, the lobby’s influence has declined, forcing it to resort to deceptive advertising and incendiary accusations.
There are two parts of Clifton’s and Lustick’s argument about which I wanted to read more. The first has to do with situating the lobby in American politics. Clifton and Lustick accept Mearsheimer and Walt’s definition of the Israel lobby as “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” That might have been OK in 2007, but in 2008, Jeremy Ben-Ami founded J Street, which billed itself as “pro-Israel,” and which has attempted to move American foreign policy in a completely different direction from AIPAC and the other “pro-Israel” groups that Mearsheimer and Walt had assigned to the lobby. The lobby Clifton and Lustick describe represents one interpretation of what it means to be “pro-Israel.”
As Clifton and Lustick note, the lobby has gradually shifted rightward in American politics and in its view of Israel. AIPAC, which was initially run by liberal Democrats and had its base in the Democratic Congress, began moving toward the Republicans in 1982, when it made Robert Asher its president. In 1993, it replaced its executive director Thomas Dine, a former aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), with Howard Kohr, a Republican operative. In its early days, AIPAC was aligned with Israel’s social-democratic Labor Party, but it has moved closer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its aim for a Greater Israel. It harried Barack Obama’s attempts to achieve a two-state solution. Its PAC has not merely targeted harsh critics of Israel like El-Sayed, but liberal Zionists like former Reps. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) and Tom Malinowksi (D-N.J.).
And it’s not just AIPAC. The constellation of groups is now weighted toward Republican proponents of a greater Israel. It includes Christians United for Israel, which boasts a larger membership than AIPAC; a revived, Adelson-funded Zionist Organization of America; and the Republican Jewish Coalition, which dwarfs its Democratic counterpart. The funders have also tilted rightward. In the 1970s, AIPAC’s president and major donor was real estate developer Larry Weinberg, a liberal Democrat close to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Clifton and Lustick’s lobby still includes major Democratic donors including Saban, but more of the money is coming from Trump supporters like Miriam Adelson, Yass, Singer, and Ellison.
In short, the lobby is increasingly part of a conservative, pro-Trump Republican faction that backs the right wing of Israel’s politics. It is opposed not only by the Democrats who support J Street — or beyond that, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — but also by a growing group of Republican conservatives who believe that in his support for Israel, Trump has betrayed his commitment to “America First.” I would have liked to know more about the political debates that took place inside AIPAC in the 1990s when it shifted most decisively rightward and in AIPAC and other groups during the Trump years.
What I would have also liked to read more about is the precise relationship between the lobby and the Israeli government. AIPAC, the main group in question, grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was founded in 1949 and was funded by the Israeli government. In 1963, in response to demands that it register as a foreign agent, AZC changed its name to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and rewrote its charter to exclude foreign contributions.
Since then, as far as is known, AIPAC has no financial or other legal ties to Israel’s government or institutions. But Clifton and Lustick suggest that the lobby is “the agent of a foreign power.” The title of their book is similarly provocative. They called it “Israel’s Lobby” rather than “The Israel Lobby,” and they subtitle the book, “America in the Grip of a Foreign Power.” That implies that the lobby is subordinate to the Israeli government, even if it is not financed or staffed by it.
They give one example of how that relationship has worked, citing a quote in a book about U.S.-Israel relations from an unnamed Israeli diplomat who served when George Shultz was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State. They wrote that the Israeli diplomat:
came up with the idea of “turning Israel into a Major Non-NATO Ally. We told AIPAC, which started rolling the idea up and down Capitol Hill corridors until it was accepted.”
They also cite what an Israel official, unaware that he was being recorded, said in 2015 to an American audience about the government’s efforts to get the Senate to oppose the Iran nuclear arms deal. “We have the FDD. We have others working on …data gathering, working on activist organizations, money trail.”
They summarize the relationship in this way: “Israeli government operatives do not control the organizations … Israeli officials send signals that guide the behavior and the rhetoric of Lobby leaders and thousands of activists.” But these two examples don’t go far enough in making that case. The first is from a single source decades ago, and the second is ambiguous. What does “having FDD” mean? One wants to know whether the staff or the leadership in these groups have relationships with people in Israeli government ministries who send them signals. Are there examples of Israel’s government persuading one of the groups to do something it had not thought of doing or was wary of undertaking?
Answering these questions about the group’s political evolution or its precise relationship to the Israeli government would have required trying to get people who have worked in these groups to talk candidly about what went on. That kind of journalism is, perhaps, beyond the call of duty for this book.
What Clifton and Lustick have provided is a comprehensive and much-needed account of how the groups and individuals that make up the lobby have attempted to influence American politics and policy. That’s quite an achievement, and anyone interested in America’s relationship with Israel should pick up Clifton and Lustick’s book.
John B. Judis is the author of eleven books, including “Genesis: Truman, American Jews and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” He was a longtime senior editor of The New Republic and currently writes for his Substack, Foreign & Domestic.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
Wikimedia Commons, Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creator: Srpske Novine
After spending millions of dollars redecorating the White House and transforming D.C. monuments, President Trump approved, on September 15, 2026, an additional 2.8 billion dollar sale of heavy bombs to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs, 20,000 of the 2,000 lb. bombs, and 20,000 bunker-busting penetrator warheads. Israel has used these bombs to destroy homes, families and crucial infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
This latest U.S. weapons package will replenish Israel’s stockpile of bombs that human rights groups have condemned after documenting their use over the past two and a half years to kill, maim, bereave, and forcibly displace Palestinians. Survivors whose homes have been reduced to rubble now live in makeshift shelters, including flimsy tents, while Israel continues to restrict deliveries of supplies that could protect Gazans from harsh weather, disease, rodent and insect infestations, and other hardships of displacement.
In June of 2026, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 170,000 households in Gaza, equivalent to nearly one million people, were living in tents. “Another 5,000 households sleep outdoors,” they reported, “while 52,000 households live in overcrowded shelters.” As Gazans enter the rainy and cold months of winter, they still lack emergency shelter items. They need plastic sheeting, plywood, and rope. Genocidal war and siege drive the crisis they face as the Israelis continue destroying Gazan homes and shelters and imposing restrictions which block desperately needed relief.
Over the past two years, members of the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine coalition have held weekly online meetings with Palestinians living in the West Bank. They update our coordinating committee about their experiences amidst ongoing, U.S. provisioned Israeli genocide against Palestinians. They speak with anguish about people in the West Bank and Gaza enduring persecution, travel restrictions, hunger, inadequate medical care, land theft, contamination, and an alarming rise in pogrom-style attacks by illegal settlers who are often assisted by Israeli military and police forces.
Our Palestinian coalition members living in the West Bank long to extend a helping hand to people trapped in Gaza. They recently raised the dilemma of Gazan children who have already lost years of education. Many live in wretched tent encampments, lack adequate food and medicine, and struggle with psycho-social traumas because of having lost their loved ones.
A Palestinian NGO, PYALARA, (Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights) suggested that our coalition could assist with practical measures to assist Gazan children who are eager to learn but who lack basic school supplies. The children are bereft of paper, pencils, pens, books, desks, and bookbags.
Recently, for UN News, an interviewer spoke with Julia Dicon, the Director of Education for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Association). Dicon described what education means for Palestine refugee children and why sustained support is critical. She expressed deep respect for the many ways that Palestinians maintain capacities to educate their children, even in these dire times.
The interviewer asked her to tell a story about Palestinian young people who represent courage in the face of unspeakable adversity as they continue efforts to learn and teach.
Dicon talked about two Gazan sisters, 17-year-old Tala Mousa and her 15-year-old sister, Farah Mousa, who were recently named winners of the 2026 Middle East Earth Prize. The young women regularly looked at rubble surrounding their home which Israel had bombed. Unlike President Trump who is undertaking expensive and unnecessary renovations, they longed to rebuild homes which Israelis decimated, using U.S. manufactured bombs. Fala and Farah puzzled over how they and their neighbors could begin creating the indispensable equipment to reconstruct housing: bricks. Together, using their scientific knowledge, they developed a practical way to transform rubble into reusable blocks for garden beds, pavement, and partitions.
Tala and Farah represent the potential of Gazan youth to make a significant difference in their community’s lives and futures. Their energetic, practical and impassioned approach deserves our respect and support, while at the same time we must find creative ways to resist the merchants of death who benefit from the Trump administration’s purchase of their death-dealing weapons. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman are among the U.S. companies whose profits will continue to soar while the U.S. markets their weapons, showcasing them in war zones around the world.
We live in harsh, dark times.
The latest U.S. weapon sale to Israel further confirms U.S. complicity with Israel’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We must heed an urgent call issued by those most impacted by the war crimes: “Don’t look away.”
Kathy Kelly (born 1952) is an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and, until the campaign closed in 2020, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. As part of peace team work in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US–Iraq wars. From 2009 to 2019, her activism and writing focused on Afghanistan, Yemen, and Gaza, along with domestic protests against US drone policy. She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of US military bombardment and inmates of US prisons.
The Arab states have long suffered from weak political legitimacy and ineffective governance. Authoritarian rule remains pervasive. According to Freedom House, no Arab country is currently classified as “Free,” while Jordan, Lebanon, and Comoros are rated “Partly Free.” Kuwait, following the suspension of its elected parliament in 2024, is now classified as “Not Free.”
The Arab world’s contribution to global scientific and technological development also remains below its potential. Although UNESCO reports that scientific publications from Arab states increased by 64 percent between 2015 and 2019, research-and-development spending remains comparatively low, and much of the region continues to depend heavily on imported technology.
These political and developmental weaknesses cannot be explained by domestic authoritarianism alone. External powers have profoundly shaped state-society relations in the Middle East.
Colonialism, military intervention, foreign-sponsored coups, economic dependence, and patron-client security relationships have influenced both the distribution of political power and the capacity of states to pursue independent national development.
The Persian Gulf monarchies’ longstanding military dependence on the United States represents
perhaps the clearest contemporary example.
From the Sykes-Picot Agreement and Balfour Declaration through the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli wars, outside powers repeatedly shaped the regional order. After the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War, the expansion of American military bases further institutionalized the security relationship between Washington and the Gulf Cooperation Council states.
The post-Cold War period did not bring an end to external military intervention. The United States has intervened militarily in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, among other countries, while Israel has repeatedly conducted major military operations in Lebanon and Gaza. The Military Intervention Project at Tufts University identifies almost 400 U.S. military interventions since 1776, with more than one-quarter occurring after the end of the Cold War.
The Iran War Changes the Equation
The ongoing U.S.-Israeli war against Iran exposes the limitations of the regional security system more dramatically than previous conflicts.
For decades, Washington’s Arab allies relied on American military superiority as the ultimate guarantee against external threats. Iran’s ability during the present war to impose substantial costs on American military installations has complicated that assumption.
A recent Pentagon inspector-general assessment found that Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed hundreds of structures at U.S. facilities across the Middle East and destroyed numerous American aircraft and drones. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that direct
U.S. Defense Department costs had already exceeded $38 billion by August 2026, with potentially billions more being spent each month if the conflict continues.
The lesson for the Persian Gulf Arab states is not that Iran poses no threat. Tehran has supported armed non-state organizations, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and Arab governments have legitimate concerns about Iranian power and regional ambitions.
But treating Iran exclusively as an enemy has not produced regional security either.
Iran is a large state of roughly 90 million people occupying one side of the Persian Gulf and possessing substantial military capabilities, energy resources, and geopolitical influence. No durable Persian Gulf security system can simply exclude it.
The war therefore creates an opportunity for the Gulf Arab states to reconsider their overwhelming security dependence on the United States and move toward a regional system in which neighboring states assume greater responsibility for their own collective security.
There are already signs of movement in this direction. At the 166th ministerial session of theArab League Council in September 2026, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty called for comprehensive Arab security arrangements involving greater defense coordination, crisis-response mechanisms, and implementation procedures. He proposed building on the 1950 Arab Treaty of Joint Defence while respecting the sovereignty of individual Arab states.
That proposal is important. But an exclusively Arab security architecture is insufficient.
From Arab Security to Regional Security
What the Persian Gulf ultimately requires is a regional, rather than merely Arab, security arrangement incorporating both the Gulf Cooperation Council states and Iran.
There are precedents for adversarial states negotiating institutional frameworks around shared interests. In August 2018, after two decades of negotiations, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan signed the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea. The agreement did not resolve every dispute among the five governments, but it demonstrated that states with conflicting interests could nevertheless construct rules governing security, sovereignty, resources, and economic cooperation.
The same logic should apply to the Persian Gulf.
The GCC states and Iran share an overwhelming interest in avoiding perpetual warfare. China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Europe, and the United States likewise have enormous stakes in the stability of Gulf energy production and international shipping.
The institutional challenge is therefore to transform these overlapping interests into a security framework capable of restraining individual states—including Iran—from threatening their neighbors while simultaneously reducing incentives for external military domination.
In a 2013 study coauthored with Stephen Hill, I proposed a three-tiered diplomatic approach toward U.S.-Iranian rapprochement and the eventual establishment of a Persian Gulf Security Alliance (PGSA). The basic logic of that proposal remains relevant.
A PGSA could bring together Iran, the GCC states, and the United States around common security interests. China, Russia, India, and Pakistan could participate in negotiated roles as well. Their inclusion would help prevent such an organization from becoming—or being perceived as—another Western military alliance directed against Iran, China, or Russia.
Such an arrangement would not require Gulf states to trust Iran, nor Iran to trust the United States. Successful security institutions rarely begin with trust. They create procedures through which states possessing competing interests can communicate, negotiate, monitor commitments, and gradually reduce the danger of miscalculation.
The Persian Gulf at a Crossroads
The strategic environment of West Asia has changed dramatically since October 2023 and even more sharply since the outbreak of direct warfare involving Iran.
Iran cannot realistically be removed from the regional balance of power. Tehran considers recognition of its sovereignty, its civilian nuclear program, its missile capabilities, and an end to what it views as a continuing American-Western policy of coercion to be fundamental national-security issues. Washington and the Arab Gulf states, meanwhile, have their own security concerns about Iran that any negotiated regional architecture would have to address.
A regional security organization would also serve American interests. As Washington increasingly focuses strategic resources on competition with China and Russia, participation in an inclusive Persian Gulf arrangement could preserve an American role in regional security without requiring perpetual military primacy or exclusive reliance on bilateral patron-client relationships.
For the Arab Gulf states, the stakes are even greater.
They face the difficult transition from oil-dependent rentier economies, pressures for more responsive governance, dependence on foreign labor, limited domestic industrial and agricultural capacity, rapidly growing technological demands, and the transformative—and still uncertain—effects of artificial intelligence.
Perpetual regional warfare makes confronting these challenges vastly more difficult.
The current war should therefore be understood not simply as another episode in the long confrontation between Iran, Israel, and the United States. It should force a larger reconsideration of the political and security architecture of the Persian Gulf.
For decades, Gulf security has rested primarily on American military power and bilateral protection arrangements. The present conflict demonstrates the vulnerabilities of that system.
The alternative is neither Iranian domination nor American withdrawal. It is the gradual construction of a regional security framework in which Arab states, Iran, and major international stakeholders accept institutional restraints and recognize that their long-term security is ultimately interdependent.
The Persian Gulf states are at a crossroads. Another generation of militarization, intervention, and regional confrontation is possible. But so is a different security order built around diplomacy, regional responsibility, and negotiated coexistence.
The latter will be difficult to construct.
The alternative may prove considerably more costly.
Subscribe
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
Sometimes an entire political order confesses itself in a single telephone call.
Saudi Arabia, custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, self-appointed pillar of Arab leadership and purchaser of some of the most expensive weaponry ever manufactured, has reportedly found itself seeking Israeli intelligence assistance through US Central Command against Ansar Allah in Yemen. The Jerusalem Post reports that CENTCOM-mediated discussions concerned intelligence that could help Riyadh understand Houthi deployments and future operations.
There is something almost indecently perfect about the image.
For decades, the Saudi state cultivated the mythology of sovereignty while constructing one of the most elaborate systems of strategic dependency in modern history. Washington supplied the security architecture. Western contractors supplied the weapons. Foreign technicians sustained the machinery. American bases anchored the regional order. Oil revenue financed the spectacle.
Riyadh bought nearly everything power was supposed to look like.
It apparently forgot to buy power.
That omission becomes difficult to conceal when a Yemeni movement battered for years by Saudi airpower, American and British strikes, and Israeli attacks can still impose strategic costs on a kingdom whose military expenditure dwarfs its own. Whatever one thinks of Ansar Allah’s ideology or domestic rule, its endurance has transformed it from a movement Riyadh once imagined it could bomb into submission into a force capable of shaping Saudi calculations.
The contrast is brutal: one side possesses palaces, Patriot batteries, consultants and procurement contracts; the other possesses missiles, drones, geography, discipline and a demonstrated willingness to endure.
Only one of those packages automatically generates strategic autonomy.
Saudi Arabia’s predicament became still more vivid after drone attacks damaged its East-West oil pipeline, forcing shipment reductions and suspending loadings at Yanbu. The artery designed to insulate the kingdom from Gulf vulnerability suddenly became another vulnerability. European customers scrambled for replacement barrels while Riyadh confronted the elementary fact that infrastructure worth billions remains infrastructure somebody can hit.
Washington, Tel Aviv and their regional partners have traditionally presented Iran’s network of allies as an aberration to be dismantled: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi armed factions, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and other forces clustered around what supporters call the Axis of Resistance. Yet the durability of that network has exposed something the Gulf security model would prefer not to discuss.
Iran built influence through relationships capable of surviving punishment.
The Gulf monarchies built influence through invoices.
One model is far poorer, far rougher and frequently coercive. The other possesses sovereign wealth funds, skyscrapers and excellent branding departments. But when regional power is measured by the ability to alter an adversary’s behavior, absorb retaliation and continue operating, the supposedly primitive model has repeatedly proved harder to neutralize than the gleaming one.
That is precisely why Riyadh turning toward Israeli intelligence is so politically revealing.
Israel is not entering this architecture as some neutral technical consultant. It is a military power whose regional strategy is deeply intertwined with American primacy and whose mass murder campaigns have generated extraordinary political anger across the Arab and Muslim worlds. Yet portions of the Arab security establishment are becoming more operationally intertwined with it. Military chiefs from Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt recently met in Germany under CENTCOM auspices to discuss regional security cooperation and the conflict with Iran.
So much for the old theatre.
For years, Gulf rulers perfected the choreography of denouncing Israel rhetorically while embedding themselves ever more deeply inside the American security architecture that guarantees Israeli military predominance. Palestine supplied the speeches; Washington supplied the command structure; Western arsenals supplied the hardware.
Now even the choreography is becoming unnecessary.
The deeper indictment belongs to the imperial system that produced this dependency. American power in West Asia has rarely required formal colonies when client states, military bases, arms dependence and security guarantees could accomplish much the same strategic purpose more elegantly. The genius of modern empire is that the subordinate is permitted a flag, an anthem and a sovereign wealth fund.
What it is not permitted is genuine strategic independence.
The Saudi monarchy embodies that contradiction exquisitely. It possesses almost unimaginable wealth yet repeatedly discovers that wealth cannot manufacture legitimacy, geographic depth, political cohesion or autonomous deterrence. Its rulers can purchase aircraft by the squadron and consultants by the battalion, but neither can solve the underlying problem: a state dependent on an external hegemon for its security remains dependent however magnificent the palace.
Meanwhile, the resistance axis that Washington, Israel and Riyadh have spent years trying to isolate persists precisely because destruction has repeatedly failed to produce submission. That does not make every actor within it virtuous. It does make the central strategic fact impossible to dismiss.
They endured.
And endurance has become the currency their adversaries cannot print.
That is why the reported Saudi appeal for Israeli intelligence matters. It is not merely a wartime arrangement. It is an X-ray of the regional order.
The palaces have the money. Washington has the architecture. Israel has the intelligence.
And the men they spent years dismissing as an expendable nuisance have somehow acquired the one thing no arms contract can deliver:
the power to make the palace call for help. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Get the latest CounterCurrents updates delivered straight to your inbox. Join Our Newsletter
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/). Share this:
By 
