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When American Jewish intellectuals criticize Israel and pro-Israel lobbying
Hadi bin Hurr
September 15, 2025
© Photo: Public domain

The sharp critiques of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby from dozens of brilliant American Jewish thinkers testify to their moral need for deep self-examination and for a redefinition of Jewish identity, Hadi bin Hurr writes.

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U.S.–Israeli relations cannot be properly understood — and in some cases may not be understood at all — unless one undertakes a fairly serious intellectual effort to gain a deeper grasp of the complex mechanisms and activities of pro-Israeli lobbying in the United States. When we address this particular subject, most Americans — and the rest of us — can only reach that understanding if they first make a deliberate choice to permanently and completely ignore the propaganda of the U.S. mainstream media and, instead of treating it as a source of supposedly reliable, analytically rigorous information, turn to recognized intellectual authorities. There is an unwritten rule that authentic intellectuals should feel a strong moral duty to convey the truth to the public about any burning issue of national significance exactly as it is — without any need to polish it or to exaggerate its dangers. It is simply a matter of basic academic integrity. The political force of the collective work and public activity of America’s intellectual elite — at least of those who truly belong to that category — lies solely in their ability, through research, to produce materials that further analytical work can turn into documented arguments supporting claims that do, or could, carry political weight. Dishonest tactics — glossing over deeply disturbing facts in the name of a perverted version of political correctness or to defend a particular political agenda — cover-ups, lies, slander and the frenzied demonization of dissenters are just some of the standard tools in politicians’ arsenals that U.S. intellectuals find utterly repugnant.

Of course, the question arises how capable an average observer of general geopolitical developments — that is, someone who, because they are preoccupied with the day-to-day struggle to survive, tends to be fairly superficial — is of, even when genuinely concerned about the welfare of American society, pursuing a truly diligent inquiry into the secrets — sometimes plainly visible — of Israel’s powerful sway over U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Raising public awareness of this destructive phenomenon, which threatens not only the Middle East and the United States but global peace as well, is of enormous importance to American society. Ordinary Americans typically embark on this particular kind of reexamination of political reality only when, at some point, they instinctively — but very strongly — begin to sense that something is deeply rotten in the country they proudly call home. American intellectuals, however, do not wait for that kind of political awakening before they respond in a timely way to abnormalities they detect. Their sense of intellectual responsibility to the society in which they live compels them to remain constantly vigilant. For that reason, the critical judgments of American intellectuals about Israeli lobbying influence in the U.S. should never be ignored — especially when those critiques come from Jewish intellectuals whom no reasonable person should try to brand as antisemitic merely to silence them. Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening across the United States: the cream of the crop of Jewish intellectual life is being publicly pilloried for an alleged hatred of their own people.

Many Americans — and anyone else who knows the subject well — could rightly observe that lobbying in the U.S. domestic political system is a fully legal practice, governed by clear statutory rules, and that this certainly applies to the pro-Israel lobby as well. That could also mean that singling out an unusually intense interest specifically in the activities of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., even when that interest comes from American Jewish intellectuals, might be taken as an expression of hidden prejudice whose character is politically unacceptable or even partly activates conspiracy thinking in practice. It is correct that lobbying activity in the U.S. is legally regulated by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. In the American political system there are two main forms of lobbying, and both are sustained by donations — both disclosed contributions and, in some channels, undisclosed funding often referred to as “dark money.” Direct lobbying involves communicating with officials who can influence particular pieces of legislation that matter to the forces behind the lobbyists. The other form seeks to influence lawmakers indirectly by shaping public opinion — this is so-called grassroots lobbying. Influence in the U.S. political system no longer travels only along old lines of personal political contacts; it also passes through direct financial support for candidates’ campaigns. These mechanisms are carried out through Political Action Committees (PACs), which can be created by a wide range of interest groups — for example, NGOs, corporations, and labor unions — with the goal of providing financial backing to particular political forces and individuals. Political Action Committees allow lobbyists, proportional to the funds they raise, to shape American political life according to interests that are often highly nontransparent — whether those interests are domestic or foreign, commercial or otherwise. Although this may look different to non-Americans, all of this is indeed legal practice in the United States and is not, in itself, open to straightforward dispute. The problem, however, remains: the complex web of activity by pro-Israel lobbying organizations represents a lever through which Israel achieves — if not the complete control sometimes alleged, then at least an unacceptably strong influence — over U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs.

The undisputed leader and most powerful actor behind that alarmingly strong pro-Israel influence in the United States is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded in 1954 with the official mission of securing a firm U.S.–Israel alliance for the mutual benefit of both countries. In practice, however, AIPAC’s efforts are directed at shaping U.S. foreign policy in an explicitly pro-Israel direction by exerting influence over the American executive and legislative branches. A key turning point in the evolution of the strategies used to achieve this occurred in 2021, when AIPAC’s leadership decided to adopt a model of direct funding for the political campaigns of U.S. officeholders — candidates for the highest offices. Previously, AIPAC had exercised influence by relying on the intermediary power of its members. This radical strategic shift allowed the vast financial resources of this pro-Israel lobbying organization to be deployed far more efficiently. In 2024 alone, AIPAC reportedly spent more than $100 million on federal elections, $35 million of which went to TV advertising and other propaganda materials. From the outset, the new approach produced visible results — in 2022, for example, as many as 98% of the candidates AIPAC supported won their general elections. That figure should alarm any honorable American, because it raises the real possibility that Israel has effectively kidnapped democracy in the United States by replacing it with increasingly direct control over the entirety of American political life.

A somewhat “softer” and less aggressive alternative to AIPAC — which largely brings together somewhat more conservative pro-Israel lobbyists — is the second-largest American pro-Israel advocacy organization, J Street, which is more closely aligned with the Democrats than with the Republicans. While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee opted for a bipartisan approach — an ideological promiscuity pursued in the name of maximum influence, meaning it funds both Republican and Democratic candidates (though to a somewhat greater and growing extent Republicans) — J Street describes itself as a political home for peace-oriented, pro-Israel, pro-democratic Americans. As such, it favors diplomatic and multilateral approaches to resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Between the aggressive AIPAC, which many regard as an agent of the Israeli government, and the more progressive J Street there exists a deep ideological split that, to some degree, calls into question theories that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is a single, monolithic force. Most likely, however, this divergence simply reflects the American two-party political system as it plays out in pro-Israel lobbying. Although J Street uses different tactics, emphasizes diplomacy, and combines grassroots activism with funding for more pacifist candidates, it would be naive to assume the group is any less pro-Israel than AIPAC — a frequent criticism voiced by right-wing Jewish circles. By favoring soft-power strategies, J Street may in fact be potentially more dangerous to U.S. sovereignty, since its peaceful image could make its actual intentions far less apparent.

However, when it comes to one of the oldest — and today one of the most influential — pro-Israel organizations in the United States, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which was founded as the Federation of American Zionists back in 1897, there is no ambiguity about its actual aims. Over its long history the ZOA has evolved from a liberal group into an extremely right-wing Jewish organization. Unlike AIPAC, whose primary focus is military assistance to Israel, and J Street, which pushes for diplomatic solutions and multilateral approaches, the ZOA concentrates on combating what it calls “anti-Israel bias” through education and media and campus campaigns. The ZOA sponsors numerous cultural and educational programs both in the U.S. and in Israel itself. Ideologically, this pro-Israel group sits on the far right, and for example it decisively rejects the idea of any form of Palestinian statehood.

Propaganda efforts are also a focus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), another pro-Israel lobbying organization founded in 1913 with an official mission to fight defamation of the Jewish people. During the 1970s the ADL began promoting the notion of the so-called “new anti-Semitism,” by which anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel were defined — no less, no more — as forms of anti-Semitism. In that way many Jewish intellectuals and other Jews who spare no critique of Zionists and Israel were automatically accused of anti-Semitism. The ADL is not only a lobbying group; it also presents itself as a civil-rights organization — but that, most likely, is merely a cover for another form of pro-Israel advocacy.

More recently the pro-Israel lobby has opened a whole new front by mobilizing various Christian Zionist movements. The largest among these groups is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, which claims to have more than 10 million members — which, if true, would make it the biggest pro-Israel organization in the United States. CUFI — which describes itself as an evangelical organization — is known for its mass “Nights to Honor Israel” solidarity events and for prayer groups called “Daughters for Zion.” Most of CUFI’s work is tied to grassroots campaigns and direct contacts with politicians who can influence legislation. It is precisely evangelical eschatological beliefs — the idea that Jews must return to Palestine, rebuild the Third Temple, and restore its rituals and sacrifices so that the Second Coming of Jesus can occur — that are the main reason CUFI members feel such a strong imperative to defend Israel. However, this evangelical belief departs significantly from the convictions of most other Christians.

What is perfectly clear is that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is organized to reach virtually every target group imaginable — Republicans and Democrats alike; conservatives and liberals; hawkish militants and those who prefer diplomatic solutions; advocates of unilateral approaches to the Palestinian issue and supporters of multilateral solutions; proponents of direct action and those who favor educational strategies — and finally both Jewish and Christian Zionists. This is almost certainly not accidental but rather the result of a sophisticated strategy devised outside the U.S. Pro-Israel lobbying organizations may not — because of certain ideological splits — form a homogeneous, monolithic bloc, yet the way their activities align produces a dynamic, composite lobbying force whose combined media, financial, and political power is large enough that, despite internal disagreements, it can be regarded as a single instrument of Israeli influence on American foreign policy. Criticism of this destructive influence, of Zionist ideology, and of the State of Israel itself is not a recent phenomenon within the American Jewish community. What could be considered a genuinely new trend, however, is the dramatic and sustained rise in the intensity and visibility of these criticisms in American society — and these are to a much greater extent a reaction to Israel’s actions than a simple reflection of a sharper generational divide within the American Jewish community. Research shows that younger American Jews are increasingly critical of Israel and more often prioritize the country in which they were born and live, which is natural and understandable. For that reason, arrogant remarks by Israeli politicians have an increasingly provocative effect on younger generations of American Jews, especially among emerging intellectuals. Recall, for example, Netanyahu’s now-famous 2001 remark — made during a conversation with settlers in a private setting, apparently unaware he was being recorded:

“I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved in the right direction… They won’t get in our way.”

This video was first released in 2010 on Israel’s Channel 10, and shortly afterward The Washington Post published an article commenting on Netanyahu’s boast — a boast that unfortunately is grounded in real events. What Netanyahu and many other Israeli politicians failed to grasp is that such statements backfire on Israel, rallying the entire patriotic American public — a constituency that increasingly includes younger, well-educated Jews. The extremist rhetoric of Netanyahu and other Israeli hawks meets increasingly sharp pushback from the American public every day, and particularly from the Jewish community, which feels a growing sense of responsibility regarding the crimes of the Zionist state. When it comes to Jewish criticism of Israel’s malign influence in the U.S., the opinions of Jewish intellectuals carry enormous moral and ethical weight, and therefore deserve special attention and respect. Among observers who lack deeper knowledge, it is commonly assumed that Jewish criticism of Israel in the U.S. is the lonely voice of idealists, leftists, or liberals — but nothing could be further from the truth. It would be far more accurate to say that there is a pattern whereby authentic Jewish intellectuals — those who meet the strictest possible standards of moral and ethical integrity — are, by virtue of that integrity, predisposed to be vigorous critics of Israel and of its lobby in the United States.

A prime example is the force of Max Blumenthal’s criticism of Israel — Blumenthal is an American Jewish journalist, editor, author, blogger, and filmmaker, born in Boston in 1977. The value of his work rests on his marked tendency to ground his claims in solid arguments and extensive documentation, as well as in reports, video recordings, and photographs gathered during on-the-ground reporting — he is definitely not an armchair journalist. Blumenthal‘s major works include the books Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013) and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (2015). Both are based on periods he spent in Gaza and in parts of the West Bank under harsh Israeli occupation. His conclusions about Israel are extremely sharp — he claims the Jewish state is becoming a totalitarian, fascist regime with clear racist and genocidal intentions. He also spares no criticism for the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which he publicly portrays as the greatest threat to free speech in the West. In January of this year, Blumenthal harshly attacked outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken at his final press conference in that role, accusing him of having allowed genocide against Palestinians — the Holocaust of our time. Because of such incendiary rhetoric, and like many other American Jewish intellectuals whose Jewishness is undisputed, Blumenthal has been labeled an “anti-Semite” by the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. — a charge that is, of course, absurd and utterly ridiculous.

Max Blumenthal, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he studied history, is the founder and editor of the news website The Grayzone, which in many ways reflects his strongly anti-imperialist ideology and a fairly open sympathy toward Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran — and even toward Hamas, which he, unlike Israel, calls a resistance movement rather than terrorists. The Grayzone, although an alternative platform, has demonstrably significant global influence when it comes to criticizing U.S. foreign policy and its allies. Like many other Jewish intellectuals, Blumenthal openly supports the nonviolent, non-profit, pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which — as its name implies — promotes boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel, calls for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territories, and demands a permanent end to apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against Palestinians. Max Blumenthal is probably the fiercest American Jewish critic of Israel. Among other things, he advocates that Israel should be permanently dismantled as a state and cease to exist, and emphasizes an insider perspective — claiming that, as some may not know, he is a de facto part of influential Jewish elites.

Another fierce critic of Israel is Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist and activist born in 1953 in New York City to Jewish parents who were both Holocaust survivors—his mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, and his father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. Finkelstein earned his undergraduate degree at Binghamton University and later received a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. He has spent most of his professional career teaching at institutions such as Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University. The history of his family influenced him to devote a large portion of his scholarly research to the Holocaust, but the work that brought him wider public attention—both inside and beyond the United States—concerns his thorough analysis of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, or, more precisely, the Palestinian tragedy that has unfolded over the past century. Finkelstein has described his academic project as an attempt to forensically expose the pseudo-scientific theories and arguments of predecessors who worked in the same fields. Over time these intellectual efforts made him one of the most outspoken critics of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Accordingly, Norman Finkelstein does not hesitate to call Israel a Jewish supremacist state and to say it is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people; he even describes it as a ‘satanic state’ that seems to have come out of the boils of hell. In his book Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018) he documents in detail and vigorously condemns Israeli crimes in Gaza. However, Finkelstein became widely known to the general public in 2000 when he published The Holocaust Industry, in which he argued that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby misuse the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II as an ideological instrument that grants them immunity from fully warranted criticism today. By underpinning his claims with rigorous documentary evidence—including primary sources and official reports—Finkelstein has shown that his criticisms of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby cannot be dismissed, since they have clear scholarly substance and merit.

A work of comparable scholarly importance is that of the American professor, linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky, born in 1928 in Philadelphia to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. His family’s working-class background strongly shaped his ideological outlook and helped make him, over time, one of the most influential figures on the global left. Very early on he felt a moral obligation, as an intellectual, to expose the American corporate elites and the manipulative media under their control. That same sense of moral responsibility shaped his attitude toward Israel, even though he was raised in an environment steeped in Jewish cultural values. In 1953, as a young, left-leaning idealist, Chomsky spent several months at Hashomer Hatzair’s HaZore’a kibbutz during his stay in Israel. Although he later remembered that period as containing pleasant days, he also admitted he was profoundly appalled by Jewish nationalism and racism, especially toward Arabs. This early and very unpleasant experience deepened in subsequent years and, combined with his research-based analysis of global geopolitics and American imperialism, helped form his stance toward the pro-Israel lobby and toward Israel itself — which he views as an American strategic military foothold projecting Washington’s power into an otherwise permanently unstable Middle East.

In his works The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983), Middle East Illusions (2003), Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War against the Palestinians (2010), and On Palestine (2015), Chomsky argues that Israeli actions in the occupied territories are far worse than apartheid, and that those mass Israeli crimes against Palestinians would not be possible without U.S. support and assistance. At the same time, he acknowledges the other side of the coin, accusing the pro-Israel lobby in the United States of driving Washington’s disastrous Middle East policies, including toward Iran. He explicitly identifies and emphasizes that the activities of AIPAC and other similar pro-Israel lobbying groups are responsible for manipulating American foreign policy not only to the detriment of Palestinians but, above all, to the detriment of U.S. national interests. The greatest strength of Chomsky’s arguments lies in their consistent reliance on a broad analysis of international relations — he views Israel and the pro-Israel lobby as integral parts of a much larger geopolitical picture.

Consistency is one of the foremost qualities of American writer, political activist, and commentator Phyllis Bennis, who was born in 1951 in Los Angeles. Raised in a Jewish family, she explicitly identifies as an American Jew, yet as she matured intellectually she also emerged as one of the most prominent anti-Israel activists in the United States. As director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis has focused her research primarily on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and on the role of the United Nations in that region. She is a founding member of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, has served on the board of Jewish Voice for Peace, is an active participant in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and has advocated a one-state solution under which Palestine — within the borders that existed during the British colonial administration — would become a civic, democratic state in which all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, race, or religion, would enjoy identical human, civil, and political rights. All of this has positioned Phyllis Bennis as a key anti-Israel activist within the American Jewish community.

Her public criticism of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, and her strong opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, stem from her leftist and anti-imperialist ideological convictions; for that reason her arguments sometimes receive insufficient attention in ideological circles of other persuasions. However, Bennis relies not on rhetoric but on factual argumentation to make her forceful case about the special character of the U.S.–Israeli alliance — an alliance that, she argues, grants Israel special protection and de facto impunity on the international stage because it can count on Washington’s unreserved support. According to her analysis, AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbyists in the United States have created a political environment in which criticism of Israel is effectively taboo, since U.S. politicians, fearing electoral consequences, adhere to those rules of the game: candidates who cannot expect financial backing from the pro-Israel lobby have very slim chances of winning. Bennis clearly exposes the channels through which U.S. taxpayers’ money is used to procure advanced military technology that Israel ultimately employs in its massacres of Palestinians. She is a signatory of ”A Statement From Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC,” in which a significant portion of the American Jewish intellectual community condemned the activities of that pro-Israel lobbying organization as deeply harmful to the country’s vital national interests. The undeniable force and persuasiveness of Phyllis Bennis’s anti-Israel critique derives from the fact that her core expertise is precisely the analysis of U.S. foreign policy, and that she consistently grounds her arguments in international law and ethics.

Norman Solomon is another fearless left-wing, American Jewish anti-Israel activist, journalist, media critic, and author. Born in Washington in 1951, Solomon came under FBI surveillance as a teenager. After finishing high school, he devoted his life to progressive activism. Shortly thereafter, because of civil disobedience during one of the numerous protests of the anti-nuclear movement in which he took part, he was arrested and spent 40 days in jail. During the 1980s, Norman Solomon traveled to Russia eight times as the leader of an American activists’ group, the Alliance of Atomic Veterans, and led demonstrations in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow calling on the United States to join the USSR in halting nuclear weapons tests. Solomon’s turbulent activist youth later matured into political and intellectual stature that at one point brought him close to the U.S. Congress; he served as national director of the activist organization RootsAction and was the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, whose core mission is to provide journalists with alternative information sources.

In his fierce critique of AIPAC, Norman Solomon — like many of his compatriots and fellow activists — publicly identifies as Jewish, thereby making clear that he feels entitled and fully qualified to speak out about that and similar pro-Israel lobbying groups. The professional orientation of Solomon’s media interests shaped the main thrust of his criticism of the Israeli lobby. Much of his work focuses on exposing AIPAC’s role in a propaganda war that — by stifling the right to criticism and public debate — manufactures a false national consensus, which in turn secures unconditional American support for Israel regardless of the incontrovertible crimes of the Zionist state. Solomon, like Bennis, is also one of the important signatories of ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC.” Because Solomon’s critique of Israel and the Israeli lobby in the U.S. is grounded in exposing mechanisms of propaganda and media manipulation, it carries particular weight and force. Solomon often stresses that American Jews support only governments that respect all human and civil rights, including the right to self-determination; this is his universal ethical message, which he frames as a separation of Jewish identity from Zionist racism.

In a similar vein, Sara Roy — an American Jewish political economist and scholar at Harvard University, where she served as a Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies — felt a powerful moral imperative to distinguish her family’s Jewish heritage from the crimes of the racist state of Israel. Roy was born in 1955 in West Hartford, where she grew up and graduated from Hall High School. Much like Finkelstein, Sara Roy’s life is in large part defined by being the child of Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. As she grew up, Roy visited Israel repeatedly, which gave her direct insight into the tragic and complex nature of Arab–Israeli relations and helped form an early awareness of parallels between how the Nazis treated Jews in the 1930s and 1940s and the conduct of Israeli soldiers toward Palestinians in modern times.

As a scholar and political economist, Roy has devoted her research to studying how Israel’s occupation policies undermine the Palestinian economy and society as a whole. Like Blumenthal, Roy conducted fieldwork on the ground, which is one of the many reasons she is widely regarded today as a leading academic authority on Gaza and Hamas. Although Roy does not claim that Israeli crimes against Palestinians are historically equivalent to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, she emphasizes that such parallels are unnecessary because the brutality of Israeli repression is unmistakable. At the same time, Roy openly deplores the near-unconditional support that organized segments of the American Jewish community give to Israeli acts of brutality, describing that reality as unbearable. The force of Sara Roy’s anti-Israel arguments is multilayered: they rest on decades of scholarly expertise, direct experience from Gaza, and the moral authority she derives as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. For all these reasons, Roy’s academic critique of Israel is a powerful appeal to the broader Jewish community to reconsider the values it promotes.

It was precisely through a process of reexamining his own value system that Peter Beinart — once a liberal Zionist and an apologist for Israel — gradually became one of the most influential, and even fairly radical, American critics of Israeli policy and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

A journalist, political columnist, and professor, Peter Beinart was born in 1971 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a family of Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He studied history and political science at Yale College and international relations at University College, Oxford, where he earned an M.Phil. He was formerly an editor of The New Republic, has written for Time and The Atlantic, and is now a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York; he is editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, a columnist for The New York Times, and a political commentator for CNN and MSNBC.

Much like Solomon and other Jewish intellectuals, Beinart reached a point in his life — in his case as a result of academic maturation — when he felt compelled to redefine his Jewish identity in light of the troubling political reality that Israel represents for humanity at large, and especially for Jews themselves, who however much they try, cannot escape the sense of responsibility that ties them fatefully to the Zionist state. The strongest evidence of Beinart’s development into a genuine public intellectual is the vast ideological gulf between his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2006), which defended liberal support for American interventionism against the perceived threat of “Islamic totalitarianism,” and his fourth book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, published in January 2025, in which he publicly urges the entire Jewish community to confront the immorality of their defense of Israel and the fact that nearly the whole of Jewish cultural heritage has been misused to justify mass slaughter and starvation in Gaza.

A former Zionist who apparently experienced a catharsis of personal political and moral awakening, Peter Beinart now openly calls Israel’s actions in Gaza by their proper names, and accuses the American Jewish lobby of complicity in crimes against Palestinians. He is one of those Jewish intellectuals — like Bennis — who believes it is necessary to form a single, democratic, civic state in which Palestinians would have exactly the same human, civil, and political rights as Israelis and all other citizens. Once a mainstream analyst, Beinart has transformed into a fierce critic of AIPAC, particularly of its strategy for maintaining bipartisan consensus, which has stretched the definition of what counts as a pro-Israel position into an ideologically elastic and ambiguous category. It is therefore unsurprising that he also signed ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC.”

Part of the power of Beinart’s critique lies in the fact that, when confronting pro-Israel mainstream propaganda, he makes skillful use of that same language and vocabulary — because he knows it well — which makes the presentation of his new political vision far more effective. His argument is strategically designed to bridge the gap between young Jews, who are generally highly critical of Israel and pro-Israel lobbying, and older generations who still idealize the Jewish state and elevate its ethno-nationalism above authentic Judaism. In short, what Beinart is attempting could be described as a desperate effort to save the honor of Jewishness from the crimes of Israel — and he does so by defending the human, civil, and political rights of Palestinians.

Similarly, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, is professionally invested in the same Palestinian rights. Her criticism of Israel is not rooted in ideology or emotion but rests firmly on principles shaped by her deep expertise in international law and human rights. She sharply condemns Israeli policies of occupation, war crimes, widespread bombing, targeted assassinations, collective punishment of Palestinians, and other breaches of international law. At the same time, Cohn points out that the pro-Israel lobby exerts tremendous influence over Congress and U.S. policy more broadly, which, among other effects, effectively pressures Washington into aggressive actions against Iran. Cohn observes, with resignation, that U.S. administrations and politicians have simply capitulated to that pressure. She described Israel’s attack on Iran in June of this year as a violation of the UN Charter, warning that U.S. participation in that unjustified military operation was entirely unlawful because it contravened U.S. constitutional and statutory law. She is also a persistent critic of American militarism and of U.S. complicity in Israeli actions against Palestinians.

Cohn’s public activism is an illustrative and moving demonstration that Jewish identity should not be an obstacle to examining and analyzing the actions of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States from a standpoint grounded in universal moral, ethical, and legal principles. Cohn is one of the signatories of the public statement “Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza,” which in October 2023 was signed by nearly 800 leading scholars and experts in international law. She also signed ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” and is a strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

One very active participant in the BDS movement — and another important signer of ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” — is the American actor, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter Wallace Shawn. He was raised in a Jewish family and describes himself as an atheist who nevertheless retains strong ties to Jewish identity and culture. Shawn says that this heritage and his ethical convictions motivate him to speak out about the most serious political problems. That conviction has made his criticism of Israel very direct and unflinchingly candid. Shawn does not hesitate to compare Israeli actions in Gaza to the crimes of Nazi Germany, calling them diabolically evil. In a statement he made in February of this year, he emphasized that one of the worst things is that Israel openly boasts about its crimes, unlike Hitler, who at least had the “decency to try to keep it secret.” At the same time, Shawn urged the world to know that Israel is starving people, preventing children from receiving necessary medical care, and bombing hospitals. Wallace Shawn’s moral position is effectively unimpeachable, because he builds his critique of Israel on principles of Jewish ethical teaching and argues that there are many people like him who simply have not yet dared to say so publicly.

Judith Butler, the American Jewish philosopher, author, and a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, certainly did not lack that kind of courage. Her scholarly work in general — and her critique of Israel and of Zionism — have attracted substantial visibility and respect within parts of the American Jewish community and in the broader American intellectual public. The foundation of her critique is rooted in post-structuralist philosophy, and its particular force lies in her ethical and intellectual consistency. Butler explains that consistency by noting that, as a Jew, she was raised with an ethical imperative to speak the truth. Consequently, she draws a clear and unambiguous distinction between Zionism — as an ethno-nationalist political project — and Jewishness, or Judaism, understood as the authentic ethical and universalist identity of Jews.

In her important book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Judith Butler sharply criticizes attempts by exponents of Zionist ideology to appropriate Jewish identity and to impose a nationalist interpretation on it. Those decidedly anti-Zionist positions form the logical and theoretical basis of her critique of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Butler is one of the few leading Jewish intellectuals who has had the courage to openly describe Israeli policy toward the Palestinians as genocide. Unsurprisingly, she is a signer of “A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” and one of the most committed and active participants in the BDS movement; in that capacity she advocates the complete dismantling of Israel as a state and the return of Palestinians to their homeland. It is also notable that Judith Butler is a prominent critic of Islamophobia — a stance that coheres with her broader anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist views — and that she has described Hamas and Hezbollah as progressive social movements. Unsurprisingly, these positions have made her a frequent target of sharp Israeli criticism.

The American Jewish professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Richard Falk, had an even more unpleasant experience with Israeli authorities. In 2008 the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed him to a six-year mandate as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories. In subsequent expert reports to the UN, Falk characterized Israel as an apartheid state with genocidal tendencies. It is important to note that Falk’s definition is presented as grounded in international law and, for that reason, is offered here as a legal assessment. Beyond being a legally framed and professionally prepared critique of Israel, his analysis is rooted in principles of humanitarian universalism and informed by direct personal experience. Richard Falk was already known for his sharp criticisms of Israel when he assumed the UN Special Rapporteur post, and he immediately clashed with the Israeli government and with pro-Israeli lobbying organizations. Israel promptly announced that it would bar Falk from entering the occupied territories, and the Anti-Defamation League called on him to resign as UN Special Rapporteur. He nevertheless remained steadfast in his assertions and in his UN work, establishing a legal framework that has brought criticisms of Israel in international politics into the domain of crimes against humanity — a legacy that could prove highly significant in the near future.

In a sense, the arrival of an era in which Israel can no longer rely on the United States’ permanent veto of Security Council resolutions — because the scale of opposition at the United Nations to a Holocaust against the Palestinians is now very close to reaching a critical mass that could neutralize America’s apparent complicity in that atrocity — was foreshadowed by the article “How the UN Can Act Decisively to End Genocide in Gaza” by American Jewish anti-war activist Medea Benjamin, which she co-authored with Nicolas J.S. Davies. That, perhaps, really could be the path that opens the way to a final end of the Palestinian tragedy — one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in human history — for which some responsibility, proportional to people’s actions and failures to act, lies with all of humanity.

An array of prominent Jewish intellectuals — who possessed a strong sense of moral and ethical responsibility, and above all the courage to raise their voices against Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States — includes so many distinguished figures that listing them all would require a multi-volume publication. In this piece, because of severe space limitations, it was absolutely impossible to give each person the attention they deserve — the selection of names presented is meant only as an illustration and as a way to pay equal honor to all their colleagues who, regrettably, could not be mentioned. The sharp critiques of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby from dozens of brilliant American Jewish thinkers testify to their moral need for deep self-examination and for a redefinition of Jewish identity through a complete separation from Zionism as a regressive, extremist, supremacist, and racist ideology — a monstrous perversion of what modern Judaism ought to be. At the same time, these thinkers almost unanimously condemn the sterile U.S. foreign policy that, having fallen into the clutches of the Israeli lobby, has become an active accomplice in the genocide of the Palestinians. The shared and essential message from these exceptional intellectuals to all of us is to be patient and to hold on a little longer, because the time is inevitably coming when all decisions affecting not only the Middle East but the future of humanity will be made by people like them — voices that refused to be silenced, guided not by fear but by truth.

Hadi bin Hurr
September 15, 2025 | World
When American Jewish intellectuals criticize Israel and pro-Israel lobbying

The sharp critiques of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby from dozens of brilliant American Jewish thinkers testify to their moral need for deep self-examination and for a redefinition of Jewish identity, Hadi bin Hurr writes.

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U.S.–Israeli relations cannot be properly understood — and in some cases may not be understood at all — unless one undertakes a fairly serious intellectual effort to gain a deeper grasp of the complex mechanisms and activities of pro-Israeli lobbying in the United States. When we address this particular subject, most Americans — and the rest of us — can only reach that understanding if they first make a deliberate choice to permanently and completely ignore the propaganda of the U.S. mainstream media and, instead of treating it as a source of supposedly reliable, analytically rigorous information, turn to recognized intellectual authorities. There is an unwritten rule that authentic intellectuals should feel a strong moral duty to convey the truth to the public about any burning issue of national significance exactly as it is — without any need to polish it or to exaggerate its dangers. It is simply a matter of basic academic integrity. The political force of the collective work and public activity of America’s intellectual elite — at least of those who truly belong to that category — lies solely in their ability, through research, to produce materials that further analytical work can turn into documented arguments supporting claims that do, or could, carry political weight. Dishonest tactics — glossing over deeply disturbing facts in the name of a perverted version of political correctness or to defend a particular political agenda — cover-ups, lies, slander and the frenzied demonization of dissenters are just some of the standard tools in politicians’ arsenals that U.S. intellectuals find utterly repugnant.

Of course, the question arises how capable an average observer of general geopolitical developments — that is, someone who, because they are preoccupied with the day-to-day struggle to survive, tends to be fairly superficial — is of, even when genuinely concerned about the welfare of American society, pursuing a truly diligent inquiry into the secrets — sometimes plainly visible — of Israel’s powerful sway over U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Raising public awareness of this destructive phenomenon, which threatens not only the Middle East and the United States but global peace as well, is of enormous importance to American society. Ordinary Americans typically embark on this particular kind of reexamination of political reality only when, at some point, they instinctively — but very strongly — begin to sense that something is deeply rotten in the country they proudly call home. American intellectuals, however, do not wait for that kind of political awakening before they respond in a timely way to abnormalities they detect. Their sense of intellectual responsibility to the society in which they live compels them to remain constantly vigilant. For that reason, the critical judgments of American intellectuals about Israeli lobbying influence in the U.S. should never be ignored — especially when those critiques come from Jewish intellectuals whom no reasonable person should try to brand as antisemitic merely to silence them. Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening across the United States: the cream of the crop of Jewish intellectual life is being publicly pilloried for an alleged hatred of their own people.

Many Americans — and anyone else who knows the subject well — could rightly observe that lobbying in the U.S. domestic political system is a fully legal practice, governed by clear statutory rules, and that this certainly applies to the pro-Israel lobby as well. That could also mean that singling out an unusually intense interest specifically in the activities of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., even when that interest comes from American Jewish intellectuals, might be taken as an expression of hidden prejudice whose character is politically unacceptable or even partly activates conspiracy thinking in practice. It is correct that lobbying activity in the U.S. is legally regulated by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. In the American political system there are two main forms of lobbying, and both are sustained by donations — both disclosed contributions and, in some channels, undisclosed funding often referred to as “dark money.” Direct lobbying involves communicating with officials who can influence particular pieces of legislation that matter to the forces behind the lobbyists. The other form seeks to influence lawmakers indirectly by shaping public opinion — this is so-called grassroots lobbying. Influence in the U.S. political system no longer travels only along old lines of personal political contacts; it also passes through direct financial support for candidates’ campaigns. These mechanisms are carried out through Political Action Committees (PACs), which can be created by a wide range of interest groups — for example, NGOs, corporations, and labor unions — with the goal of providing financial backing to particular political forces and individuals. Political Action Committees allow lobbyists, proportional to the funds they raise, to shape American political life according to interests that are often highly nontransparent — whether those interests are domestic or foreign, commercial or otherwise. Although this may look different to non-Americans, all of this is indeed legal practice in the United States and is not, in itself, open to straightforward dispute. The problem, however, remains: the complex web of activity by pro-Israel lobbying organizations represents a lever through which Israel achieves — if not the complete control sometimes alleged, then at least an unacceptably strong influence — over U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs.

The undisputed leader and most powerful actor behind that alarmingly strong pro-Israel influence in the United States is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded in 1954 with the official mission of securing a firm U.S.–Israel alliance for the mutual benefit of both countries. In practice, however, AIPAC’s efforts are directed at shaping U.S. foreign policy in an explicitly pro-Israel direction by exerting influence over the American executive and legislative branches. A key turning point in the evolution of the strategies used to achieve this occurred in 2021, when AIPAC’s leadership decided to adopt a model of direct funding for the political campaigns of U.S. officeholders — candidates for the highest offices. Previously, AIPAC had exercised influence by relying on the intermediary power of its members. This radical strategic shift allowed the vast financial resources of this pro-Israel lobbying organization to be deployed far more efficiently. In 2024 alone, AIPAC reportedly spent more than $100 million on federal elections, $35 million of which went to TV advertising and other propaganda materials. From the outset, the new approach produced visible results — in 2022, for example, as many as 98% of the candidates AIPAC supported won their general elections. That figure should alarm any honorable American, because it raises the real possibility that Israel has effectively kidnapped democracy in the United States by replacing it with increasingly direct control over the entirety of American political life.

A somewhat “softer” and less aggressive alternative to AIPAC — which largely brings together somewhat more conservative pro-Israel lobbyists — is the second-largest American pro-Israel advocacy organization, J Street, which is more closely aligned with the Democrats than with the Republicans. While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee opted for a bipartisan approach — an ideological promiscuity pursued in the name of maximum influence, meaning it funds both Republican and Democratic candidates (though to a somewhat greater and growing extent Republicans) — J Street describes itself as a political home for peace-oriented, pro-Israel, pro-democratic Americans. As such, it favors diplomatic and multilateral approaches to resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Between the aggressive AIPAC, which many regard as an agent of the Israeli government, and the more progressive J Street there exists a deep ideological split that, to some degree, calls into question theories that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is a single, monolithic force. Most likely, however, this divergence simply reflects the American two-party political system as it plays out in pro-Israel lobbying. Although J Street uses different tactics, emphasizes diplomacy, and combines grassroots activism with funding for more pacifist candidates, it would be naive to assume the group is any less pro-Israel than AIPAC — a frequent criticism voiced by right-wing Jewish circles. By favoring soft-power strategies, J Street may in fact be potentially more dangerous to U.S. sovereignty, since its peaceful image could make its actual intentions far less apparent.

However, when it comes to one of the oldest — and today one of the most influential — pro-Israel organizations in the United States, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which was founded as the Federation of American Zionists back in 1897, there is no ambiguity about its actual aims. Over its long history the ZOA has evolved from a liberal group into an extremely right-wing Jewish organization. Unlike AIPAC, whose primary focus is military assistance to Israel, and J Street, which pushes for diplomatic solutions and multilateral approaches, the ZOA concentrates on combating what it calls “anti-Israel bias” through education and media and campus campaigns. The ZOA sponsors numerous cultural and educational programs both in the U.S. and in Israel itself. Ideologically, this pro-Israel group sits on the far right, and for example it decisively rejects the idea of any form of Palestinian statehood.

Propaganda efforts are also a focus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), another pro-Israel lobbying organization founded in 1913 with an official mission to fight defamation of the Jewish people. During the 1970s the ADL began promoting the notion of the so-called “new anti-Semitism,” by which anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel were defined — no less, no more — as forms of anti-Semitism. In that way many Jewish intellectuals and other Jews who spare no critique of Zionists and Israel were automatically accused of anti-Semitism. The ADL is not only a lobbying group; it also presents itself as a civil-rights organization — but that, most likely, is merely a cover for another form of pro-Israel advocacy.

More recently the pro-Israel lobby has opened a whole new front by mobilizing various Christian Zionist movements. The largest among these groups is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, which claims to have more than 10 million members — which, if true, would make it the biggest pro-Israel organization in the United States. CUFI — which describes itself as an evangelical organization — is known for its mass “Nights to Honor Israel” solidarity events and for prayer groups called “Daughters for Zion.” Most of CUFI’s work is tied to grassroots campaigns and direct contacts with politicians who can influence legislation. It is precisely evangelical eschatological beliefs — the idea that Jews must return to Palestine, rebuild the Third Temple, and restore its rituals and sacrifices so that the Second Coming of Jesus can occur — that are the main reason CUFI members feel such a strong imperative to defend Israel. However, this evangelical belief departs significantly from the convictions of most other Christians.

What is perfectly clear is that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is organized to reach virtually every target group imaginable — Republicans and Democrats alike; conservatives and liberals; hawkish militants and those who prefer diplomatic solutions; advocates of unilateral approaches to the Palestinian issue and supporters of multilateral solutions; proponents of direct action and those who favor educational strategies — and finally both Jewish and Christian Zionists. This is almost certainly not accidental but rather the result of a sophisticated strategy devised outside the U.S. Pro-Israel lobbying organizations may not — because of certain ideological splits — form a homogeneous, monolithic bloc, yet the way their activities align produces a dynamic, composite lobbying force whose combined media, financial, and political power is large enough that, despite internal disagreements, it can be regarded as a single instrument of Israeli influence on American foreign policy. Criticism of this destructive influence, of Zionist ideology, and of the State of Israel itself is not a recent phenomenon within the American Jewish community. What could be considered a genuinely new trend, however, is the dramatic and sustained rise in the intensity and visibility of these criticisms in American society — and these are to a much greater extent a reaction to Israel’s actions than a simple reflection of a sharper generational divide within the American Jewish community. Research shows that younger American Jews are increasingly critical of Israel and more often prioritize the country in which they were born and live, which is natural and understandable. For that reason, arrogant remarks by Israeli politicians have an increasingly provocative effect on younger generations of American Jews, especially among emerging intellectuals. Recall, for example, Netanyahu’s now-famous 2001 remark — made during a conversation with settlers in a private setting, apparently unaware he was being recorded:

“I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved in the right direction… They won’t get in our way.”

This video was first released in 2010 on Israel’s Channel 10, and shortly afterward The Washington Post published an article commenting on Netanyahu’s boast — a boast that unfortunately is grounded in real events. What Netanyahu and many other Israeli politicians failed to grasp is that such statements backfire on Israel, rallying the entire patriotic American public — a constituency that increasingly includes younger, well-educated Jews. The extremist rhetoric of Netanyahu and other Israeli hawks meets increasingly sharp pushback from the American public every day, and particularly from the Jewish community, which feels a growing sense of responsibility regarding the crimes of the Zionist state. When it comes to Jewish criticism of Israel’s malign influence in the U.S., the opinions of Jewish intellectuals carry enormous moral and ethical weight, and therefore deserve special attention and respect. Among observers who lack deeper knowledge, it is commonly assumed that Jewish criticism of Israel in the U.S. is the lonely voice of idealists, leftists, or liberals — but nothing could be further from the truth. It would be far more accurate to say that there is a pattern whereby authentic Jewish intellectuals — those who meet the strictest possible standards of moral and ethical integrity — are, by virtue of that integrity, predisposed to be vigorous critics of Israel and of its lobby in the United States.

A prime example is the force of Max Blumenthal’s criticism of Israel — Blumenthal is an American Jewish journalist, editor, author, blogger, and filmmaker, born in Boston in 1977. The value of his work rests on his marked tendency to ground his claims in solid arguments and extensive documentation, as well as in reports, video recordings, and photographs gathered during on-the-ground reporting — he is definitely not an armchair journalist. Blumenthal‘s major works include the books Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013) and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (2015). Both are based on periods he spent in Gaza and in parts of the West Bank under harsh Israeli occupation. His conclusions about Israel are extremely sharp — he claims the Jewish state is becoming a totalitarian, fascist regime with clear racist and genocidal intentions. He also spares no criticism for the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which he publicly portrays as the greatest threat to free speech in the West. In January of this year, Blumenthal harshly attacked outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken at his final press conference in that role, accusing him of having allowed genocide against Palestinians — the Holocaust of our time. Because of such incendiary rhetoric, and like many other American Jewish intellectuals whose Jewishness is undisputed, Blumenthal has been labeled an “anti-Semite” by the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. — a charge that is, of course, absurd and utterly ridiculous.

Max Blumenthal, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he studied history, is the founder and editor of the news website The Grayzone, which in many ways reflects his strongly anti-imperialist ideology and a fairly open sympathy toward Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran — and even toward Hamas, which he, unlike Israel, calls a resistance movement rather than terrorists. The Grayzone, although an alternative platform, has demonstrably significant global influence when it comes to criticizing U.S. foreign policy and its allies. Like many other Jewish intellectuals, Blumenthal openly supports the nonviolent, non-profit, pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which — as its name implies — promotes boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel, calls for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territories, and demands a permanent end to apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against Palestinians. Max Blumenthal is probably the fiercest American Jewish critic of Israel. Among other things, he advocates that Israel should be permanently dismantled as a state and cease to exist, and emphasizes an insider perspective — claiming that, as some may not know, he is a de facto part of influential Jewish elites.

Another fierce critic of Israel is Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist and activist born in 1953 in New York City to Jewish parents who were both Holocaust survivors—his mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, and his father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. Finkelstein earned his undergraduate degree at Binghamton University and later received a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. He has spent most of his professional career teaching at institutions such as Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University. The history of his family influenced him to devote a large portion of his scholarly research to the Holocaust, but the work that brought him wider public attention—both inside and beyond the United States—concerns his thorough analysis of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, or, more precisely, the Palestinian tragedy that has unfolded over the past century. Finkelstein has described his academic project as an attempt to forensically expose the pseudo-scientific theories and arguments of predecessors who worked in the same fields. Over time these intellectual efforts made him one of the most outspoken critics of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Accordingly, Norman Finkelstein does not hesitate to call Israel a Jewish supremacist state and to say it is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people; he even describes it as a ‘satanic state’ that seems to have come out of the boils of hell. In his book Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018) he documents in detail and vigorously condemns Israeli crimes in Gaza. However, Finkelstein became widely known to the general public in 2000 when he published The Holocaust Industry, in which he argued that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby misuse the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II as an ideological instrument that grants them immunity from fully warranted criticism today. By underpinning his claims with rigorous documentary evidence—including primary sources and official reports—Finkelstein has shown that his criticisms of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby cannot be dismissed, since they have clear scholarly substance and merit.

A work of comparable scholarly importance is that of the American professor, linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky, born in 1928 in Philadelphia to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. His family’s working-class background strongly shaped his ideological outlook and helped make him, over time, one of the most influential figures on the global left. Very early on he felt a moral obligation, as an intellectual, to expose the American corporate elites and the manipulative media under their control. That same sense of moral responsibility shaped his attitude toward Israel, even though he was raised in an environment steeped in Jewish cultural values. In 1953, as a young, left-leaning idealist, Chomsky spent several months at Hashomer Hatzair’s HaZore’a kibbutz during his stay in Israel. Although he later remembered that period as containing pleasant days, he also admitted he was profoundly appalled by Jewish nationalism and racism, especially toward Arabs. This early and very unpleasant experience deepened in subsequent years and, combined with his research-based analysis of global geopolitics and American imperialism, helped form his stance toward the pro-Israel lobby and toward Israel itself — which he views as an American strategic military foothold projecting Washington’s power into an otherwise permanently unstable Middle East.

In his works The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983), Middle East Illusions (2003), Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War against the Palestinians (2010), and On Palestine (2015), Chomsky argues that Israeli actions in the occupied territories are far worse than apartheid, and that those mass Israeli crimes against Palestinians would not be possible without U.S. support and assistance. At the same time, he acknowledges the other side of the coin, accusing the pro-Israel lobby in the United States of driving Washington’s disastrous Middle East policies, including toward Iran. He explicitly identifies and emphasizes that the activities of AIPAC and other similar pro-Israel lobbying groups are responsible for manipulating American foreign policy not only to the detriment of Palestinians but, above all, to the detriment of U.S. national interests. The greatest strength of Chomsky’s arguments lies in their consistent reliance on a broad analysis of international relations — he views Israel and the pro-Israel lobby as integral parts of a much larger geopolitical picture.

Consistency is one of the foremost qualities of American writer, political activist, and commentator Phyllis Bennis, who was born in 1951 in Los Angeles. Raised in a Jewish family, she explicitly identifies as an American Jew, yet as she matured intellectually she also emerged as one of the most prominent anti-Israel activists in the United States. As director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis has focused her research primarily on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and on the role of the United Nations in that region. She is a founding member of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, has served on the board of Jewish Voice for Peace, is an active participant in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and has advocated a one-state solution under which Palestine — within the borders that existed during the British colonial administration — would become a civic, democratic state in which all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, race, or religion, would enjoy identical human, civil, and political rights. All of this has positioned Phyllis Bennis as a key anti-Israel activist within the American Jewish community.

Her public criticism of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, and her strong opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, stem from her leftist and anti-imperialist ideological convictions; for that reason her arguments sometimes receive insufficient attention in ideological circles of other persuasions. However, Bennis relies not on rhetoric but on factual argumentation to make her forceful case about the special character of the U.S.–Israeli alliance — an alliance that, she argues, grants Israel special protection and de facto impunity on the international stage because it can count on Washington’s unreserved support. According to her analysis, AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbyists in the United States have created a political environment in which criticism of Israel is effectively taboo, since U.S. politicians, fearing electoral consequences, adhere to those rules of the game: candidates who cannot expect financial backing from the pro-Israel lobby have very slim chances of winning. Bennis clearly exposes the channels through which U.S. taxpayers’ money is used to procure advanced military technology that Israel ultimately employs in its massacres of Palestinians. She is a signatory of ”A Statement From Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC,” in which a significant portion of the American Jewish intellectual community condemned the activities of that pro-Israel lobbying organization as deeply harmful to the country’s vital national interests. The undeniable force and persuasiveness of Phyllis Bennis’s anti-Israel critique derives from the fact that her core expertise is precisely the analysis of U.S. foreign policy, and that she consistently grounds her arguments in international law and ethics.

Norman Solomon is another fearless left-wing, American Jewish anti-Israel activist, journalist, media critic, and author. Born in Washington in 1951, Solomon came under FBI surveillance as a teenager. After finishing high school, he devoted his life to progressive activism. Shortly thereafter, because of civil disobedience during one of the numerous protests of the anti-nuclear movement in which he took part, he was arrested and spent 40 days in jail. During the 1980s, Norman Solomon traveled to Russia eight times as the leader of an American activists’ group, the Alliance of Atomic Veterans, and led demonstrations in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow calling on the United States to join the USSR in halting nuclear weapons tests. Solomon’s turbulent activist youth later matured into political and intellectual stature that at one point brought him close to the U.S. Congress; he served as national director of the activist organization RootsAction and was the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, whose core mission is to provide journalists with alternative information sources.

In his fierce critique of AIPAC, Norman Solomon — like many of his compatriots and fellow activists — publicly identifies as Jewish, thereby making clear that he feels entitled and fully qualified to speak out about that and similar pro-Israel lobbying groups. The professional orientation of Solomon’s media interests shaped the main thrust of his criticism of the Israeli lobby. Much of his work focuses on exposing AIPAC’s role in a propaganda war that — by stifling the right to criticism and public debate — manufactures a false national consensus, which in turn secures unconditional American support for Israel regardless of the incontrovertible crimes of the Zionist state. Solomon, like Bennis, is also one of the important signatories of ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC.” Because Solomon’s critique of Israel and the Israeli lobby in the U.S. is grounded in exposing mechanisms of propaganda and media manipulation, it carries particular weight and force. Solomon often stresses that American Jews support only governments that respect all human and civil rights, including the right to self-determination; this is his universal ethical message, which he frames as a separation of Jewish identity from Zionist racism.

In a similar vein, Sara Roy — an American Jewish political economist and scholar at Harvard University, where she served as a Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies — felt a powerful moral imperative to distinguish her family’s Jewish heritage from the crimes of the racist state of Israel. Roy was born in 1955 in West Hartford, where she grew up and graduated from Hall High School. Much like Finkelstein, Sara Roy’s life is in large part defined by being the child of Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. As she grew up, Roy visited Israel repeatedly, which gave her direct insight into the tragic and complex nature of Arab–Israeli relations and helped form an early awareness of parallels between how the Nazis treated Jews in the 1930s and 1940s and the conduct of Israeli soldiers toward Palestinians in modern times.

As a scholar and political economist, Roy has devoted her research to studying how Israel’s occupation policies undermine the Palestinian economy and society as a whole. Like Blumenthal, Roy conducted fieldwork on the ground, which is one of the many reasons she is widely regarded today as a leading academic authority on Gaza and Hamas. Although Roy does not claim that Israeli crimes against Palestinians are historically equivalent to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, she emphasizes that such parallels are unnecessary because the brutality of Israeli repression is unmistakable. At the same time, Roy openly deplores the near-unconditional support that organized segments of the American Jewish community give to Israeli acts of brutality, describing that reality as unbearable. The force of Sara Roy’s anti-Israel arguments is multilayered: they rest on decades of scholarly expertise, direct experience from Gaza, and the moral authority she derives as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. For all these reasons, Roy’s academic critique of Israel is a powerful appeal to the broader Jewish community to reconsider the values it promotes.

It was precisely through a process of reexamining his own value system that Peter Beinart — once a liberal Zionist and an apologist for Israel — gradually became one of the most influential, and even fairly radical, American critics of Israeli policy and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

A journalist, political columnist, and professor, Peter Beinart was born in 1971 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a family of Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He studied history and political science at Yale College and international relations at University College, Oxford, where he earned an M.Phil. He was formerly an editor of The New Republic, has written for Time and The Atlantic, and is now a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York; he is editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, a columnist for The New York Times, and a political commentator for CNN and MSNBC.

Much like Solomon and other Jewish intellectuals, Beinart reached a point in his life — in his case as a result of academic maturation — when he felt compelled to redefine his Jewish identity in light of the troubling political reality that Israel represents for humanity at large, and especially for Jews themselves, who however much they try, cannot escape the sense of responsibility that ties them fatefully to the Zionist state. The strongest evidence of Beinart’s development into a genuine public intellectual is the vast ideological gulf between his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2006), which defended liberal support for American interventionism against the perceived threat of “Islamic totalitarianism,” and his fourth book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, published in January 2025, in which he publicly urges the entire Jewish community to confront the immorality of their defense of Israel and the fact that nearly the whole of Jewish cultural heritage has been misused to justify mass slaughter and starvation in Gaza.

A former Zionist who apparently experienced a catharsis of personal political and moral awakening, Peter Beinart now openly calls Israel’s actions in Gaza by their proper names, and accuses the American Jewish lobby of complicity in crimes against Palestinians. He is one of those Jewish intellectuals — like Bennis — who believes it is necessary to form a single, democratic, civic state in which Palestinians would have exactly the same human, civil, and political rights as Israelis and all other citizens. Once a mainstream analyst, Beinart has transformed into a fierce critic of AIPAC, particularly of its strategy for maintaining bipartisan consensus, which has stretched the definition of what counts as a pro-Israel position into an ideologically elastic and ambiguous category. It is therefore unsurprising that he also signed ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC.”

Part of the power of Beinart’s critique lies in the fact that, when confronting pro-Israel mainstream propaganda, he makes skillful use of that same language and vocabulary — because he knows it well — which makes the presentation of his new political vision far more effective. His argument is strategically designed to bridge the gap between young Jews, who are generally highly critical of Israel and pro-Israel lobbying, and older generations who still idealize the Jewish state and elevate its ethno-nationalism above authentic Judaism. In short, what Beinart is attempting could be described as a desperate effort to save the honor of Jewishness from the crimes of Israel — and he does so by defending the human, civil, and political rights of Palestinians.

Similarly, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, is professionally invested in the same Palestinian rights. Her criticism of Israel is not rooted in ideology or emotion but rests firmly on principles shaped by her deep expertise in international law and human rights. She sharply condemns Israeli policies of occupation, war crimes, widespread bombing, targeted assassinations, collective punishment of Palestinians, and other breaches of international law. At the same time, Cohn points out that the pro-Israel lobby exerts tremendous influence over Congress and U.S. policy more broadly, which, among other effects, effectively pressures Washington into aggressive actions against Iran. Cohn observes, with resignation, that U.S. administrations and politicians have simply capitulated to that pressure. She described Israel’s attack on Iran in June of this year as a violation of the UN Charter, warning that U.S. participation in that unjustified military operation was entirely unlawful because it contravened U.S. constitutional and statutory law. She is also a persistent critic of American militarism and of U.S. complicity in Israeli actions against Palestinians.

Cohn’s public activism is an illustrative and moving demonstration that Jewish identity should not be an obstacle to examining and analyzing the actions of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States from a standpoint grounded in universal moral, ethical, and legal principles. Cohn is one of the signatories of the public statement “Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza,” which in October 2023 was signed by nearly 800 leading scholars and experts in international law. She also signed ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” and is a strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

One very active participant in the BDS movement — and another important signer of ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” — is the American actor, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter Wallace Shawn. He was raised in a Jewish family and describes himself as an atheist who nevertheless retains strong ties to Jewish identity and culture. Shawn says that this heritage and his ethical convictions motivate him to speak out about the most serious political problems. That conviction has made his criticism of Israel very direct and unflinchingly candid. Shawn does not hesitate to compare Israeli actions in Gaza to the crimes of Nazi Germany, calling them diabolically evil. In a statement he made in February of this year, he emphasized that one of the worst things is that Israel openly boasts about its crimes, unlike Hitler, who at least had the “decency to try to keep it secret.” At the same time, Shawn urged the world to know that Israel is starving people, preventing children from receiving necessary medical care, and bombing hospitals. Wallace Shawn’s moral position is effectively unimpeachable, because he builds his critique of Israel on principles of Jewish ethical teaching and argues that there are many people like him who simply have not yet dared to say so publicly.

Judith Butler, the American Jewish philosopher, author, and a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, certainly did not lack that kind of courage. Her scholarly work in general — and her critique of Israel and of Zionism — have attracted substantial visibility and respect within parts of the American Jewish community and in the broader American intellectual public. The foundation of her critique is rooted in post-structuralist philosophy, and its particular force lies in her ethical and intellectual consistency. Butler explains that consistency by noting that, as a Jew, she was raised with an ethical imperative to speak the truth. Consequently, she draws a clear and unambiguous distinction between Zionism — as an ethno-nationalist political project — and Jewishness, or Judaism, understood as the authentic ethical and universalist identity of Jews.

In her important book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Judith Butler sharply criticizes attempts by exponents of Zionist ideology to appropriate Jewish identity and to impose a nationalist interpretation on it. Those decidedly anti-Zionist positions form the logical and theoretical basis of her critique of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Butler is one of the few leading Jewish intellectuals who has had the courage to openly describe Israeli policy toward the Palestinians as genocide. Unsurprisingly, she is a signer of “A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” and one of the most committed and active participants in the BDS movement; in that capacity she advocates the complete dismantling of Israel as a state and the return of Palestinians to their homeland. It is also notable that Judith Butler is a prominent critic of Islamophobia — a stance that coheres with her broader anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist views — and that she has described Hamas and Hezbollah as progressive social movements. Unsurprisingly, these positions have made her a frequent target of sharp Israeli criticism.

The American Jewish professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Richard Falk, had an even more unpleasant experience with Israeli authorities. In 2008 the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed him to a six-year mandate as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories. In subsequent expert reports to the UN, Falk characterized Israel as an apartheid state with genocidal tendencies. It is important to note that Falk’s definition is presented as grounded in international law and, for that reason, is offered here as a legal assessment. Beyond being a legally framed and professionally prepared critique of Israel, his analysis is rooted in principles of humanitarian universalism and informed by direct personal experience. Richard Falk was already known for his sharp criticisms of Israel when he assumed the UN Special Rapporteur post, and he immediately clashed with the Israeli government and with pro-Israeli lobbying organizations. Israel promptly announced that it would bar Falk from entering the occupied territories, and the Anti-Defamation League called on him to resign as UN Special Rapporteur. He nevertheless remained steadfast in his assertions and in his UN work, establishing a legal framework that has brought criticisms of Israel in international politics into the domain of crimes against humanity — a legacy that could prove highly significant in the near future.

In a sense, the arrival of an era in which Israel can no longer rely on the United States’ permanent veto of Security Council resolutions — because the scale of opposition at the United Nations to a Holocaust against the Palestinians is now very close to reaching a critical mass that could neutralize America’s apparent complicity in that atrocity — was foreshadowed by the article “How the UN Can Act Decisively to End Genocide in Gaza” by American Jewish anti-war activist Medea Benjamin, which she co-authored with Nicolas J.S. Davies. That, perhaps, really could be the path that opens the way to a final end of the Palestinian tragedy — one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in human history — for which some responsibility, proportional to people’s actions and failures to act, lies with all of humanity.

An array of prominent Jewish intellectuals — who possessed a strong sense of moral and ethical responsibility, and above all the courage to raise their voices against Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States — includes so many distinguished figures that listing them all would require a multi-volume publication. In this piece, because of severe space limitations, it was absolutely impossible to give each person the attention they deserve — the selection of names presented is meant only as an illustration and as a way to pay equal honor to all their colleagues who, regrettably, could not be mentioned. The sharp critiques of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby from dozens of brilliant American Jewish thinkers testify to their moral need for deep self-examination and for a redefinition of Jewish identity through a complete separation from Zionism as a regressive, extremist, supremacist, and racist ideology — a monstrous perversion of what modern Judaism ought to be. At the same time, these thinkers almost unanimously condemn the sterile U.S. foreign policy that, having fallen into the clutches of the Israeli lobby, has become an active accomplice in the genocide of the Palestinians. The shared and essential message from these exceptional intellectuals to all of us is to be patient and to hold on a little longer, because the time is inevitably coming when all decisions affecting not only the Middle East but the future of humanity will be made by people like them — voices that refused to be silenced, guided not by fear but by truth.

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The sharp critiques of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby from dozens of brilliant American Jewish thinkers testify to their moral need for deep self-examination and for a redefinition of Jewish identity, Hadi bin Hurr writes.

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U.S.–Israeli relations cannot be properly understood — and in some cases may not be understood at all — unless one undertakes a fairly serious intellectual effort to gain a deeper grasp of the complex mechanisms and activities of pro-Israeli lobbying in the United States. When we address this particular subject, most Americans — and the rest of us — can only reach that understanding if they first make a deliberate choice to permanently and completely ignore the propaganda of the U.S. mainstream media and, instead of treating it as a source of supposedly reliable, analytically rigorous information, turn to recognized intellectual authorities. There is an unwritten rule that authentic intellectuals should feel a strong moral duty to convey the truth to the public about any burning issue of national significance exactly as it is — without any need to polish it or to exaggerate its dangers. It is simply a matter of basic academic integrity. The political force of the collective work and public activity of America’s intellectual elite — at least of those who truly belong to that category — lies solely in their ability, through research, to produce materials that further analytical work can turn into documented arguments supporting claims that do, or could, carry political weight. Dishonest tactics — glossing over deeply disturbing facts in the name of a perverted version of political correctness or to defend a particular political agenda — cover-ups, lies, slander and the frenzied demonization of dissenters are just some of the standard tools in politicians’ arsenals that U.S. intellectuals find utterly repugnant.

Of course, the question arises how capable an average observer of general geopolitical developments — that is, someone who, because they are preoccupied with the day-to-day struggle to survive, tends to be fairly superficial — is of, even when genuinely concerned about the welfare of American society, pursuing a truly diligent inquiry into the secrets — sometimes plainly visible — of Israel’s powerful sway over U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Raising public awareness of this destructive phenomenon, which threatens not only the Middle East and the United States but global peace as well, is of enormous importance to American society. Ordinary Americans typically embark on this particular kind of reexamination of political reality only when, at some point, they instinctively — but very strongly — begin to sense that something is deeply rotten in the country they proudly call home. American intellectuals, however, do not wait for that kind of political awakening before they respond in a timely way to abnormalities they detect. Their sense of intellectual responsibility to the society in which they live compels them to remain constantly vigilant. For that reason, the critical judgments of American intellectuals about Israeli lobbying influence in the U.S. should never be ignored — especially when those critiques come from Jewish intellectuals whom no reasonable person should try to brand as antisemitic merely to silence them. Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening across the United States: the cream of the crop of Jewish intellectual life is being publicly pilloried for an alleged hatred of their own people.

Many Americans — and anyone else who knows the subject well — could rightly observe that lobbying in the U.S. domestic political system is a fully legal practice, governed by clear statutory rules, and that this certainly applies to the pro-Israel lobby as well. That could also mean that singling out an unusually intense interest specifically in the activities of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., even when that interest comes from American Jewish intellectuals, might be taken as an expression of hidden prejudice whose character is politically unacceptable or even partly activates conspiracy thinking in practice. It is correct that lobbying activity in the U.S. is legally regulated by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. In the American political system there are two main forms of lobbying, and both are sustained by donations — both disclosed contributions and, in some channels, undisclosed funding often referred to as “dark money.” Direct lobbying involves communicating with officials who can influence particular pieces of legislation that matter to the forces behind the lobbyists. The other form seeks to influence lawmakers indirectly by shaping public opinion — this is so-called grassroots lobbying. Influence in the U.S. political system no longer travels only along old lines of personal political contacts; it also passes through direct financial support for candidates’ campaigns. These mechanisms are carried out through Political Action Committees (PACs), which can be created by a wide range of interest groups — for example, NGOs, corporations, and labor unions — with the goal of providing financial backing to particular political forces and individuals. Political Action Committees allow lobbyists, proportional to the funds they raise, to shape American political life according to interests that are often highly nontransparent — whether those interests are domestic or foreign, commercial or otherwise. Although this may look different to non-Americans, all of this is indeed legal practice in the United States and is not, in itself, open to straightforward dispute. The problem, however, remains: the complex web of activity by pro-Israel lobbying organizations represents a lever through which Israel achieves — if not the complete control sometimes alleged, then at least an unacceptably strong influence — over U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs.

The undisputed leader and most powerful actor behind that alarmingly strong pro-Israel influence in the United States is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded in 1954 with the official mission of securing a firm U.S.–Israel alliance for the mutual benefit of both countries. In practice, however, AIPAC’s efforts are directed at shaping U.S. foreign policy in an explicitly pro-Israel direction by exerting influence over the American executive and legislative branches. A key turning point in the evolution of the strategies used to achieve this occurred in 2021, when AIPAC’s leadership decided to adopt a model of direct funding for the political campaigns of U.S. officeholders — candidates for the highest offices. Previously, AIPAC had exercised influence by relying on the intermediary power of its members. This radical strategic shift allowed the vast financial resources of this pro-Israel lobbying organization to be deployed far more efficiently. In 2024 alone, AIPAC reportedly spent more than $100 million on federal elections, $35 million of which went to TV advertising and other propaganda materials. From the outset, the new approach produced visible results — in 2022, for example, as many as 98% of the candidates AIPAC supported won their general elections. That figure should alarm any honorable American, because it raises the real possibility that Israel has effectively kidnapped democracy in the United States by replacing it with increasingly direct control over the entirety of American political life.

A somewhat “softer” and less aggressive alternative to AIPAC — which largely brings together somewhat more conservative pro-Israel lobbyists — is the second-largest American pro-Israel advocacy organization, J Street, which is more closely aligned with the Democrats than with the Republicans. While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee opted for a bipartisan approach — an ideological promiscuity pursued in the name of maximum influence, meaning it funds both Republican and Democratic candidates (though to a somewhat greater and growing extent Republicans) — J Street describes itself as a political home for peace-oriented, pro-Israel, pro-democratic Americans. As such, it favors diplomatic and multilateral approaches to resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Between the aggressive AIPAC, which many regard as an agent of the Israeli government, and the more progressive J Street there exists a deep ideological split that, to some degree, calls into question theories that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is a single, monolithic force. Most likely, however, this divergence simply reflects the American two-party political system as it plays out in pro-Israel lobbying. Although J Street uses different tactics, emphasizes diplomacy, and combines grassroots activism with funding for more pacifist candidates, it would be naive to assume the group is any less pro-Israel than AIPAC — a frequent criticism voiced by right-wing Jewish circles. By favoring soft-power strategies, J Street may in fact be potentially more dangerous to U.S. sovereignty, since its peaceful image could make its actual intentions far less apparent.

However, when it comes to one of the oldest — and today one of the most influential — pro-Israel organizations in the United States, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which was founded as the Federation of American Zionists back in 1897, there is no ambiguity about its actual aims. Over its long history the ZOA has evolved from a liberal group into an extremely right-wing Jewish organization. Unlike AIPAC, whose primary focus is military assistance to Israel, and J Street, which pushes for diplomatic solutions and multilateral approaches, the ZOA concentrates on combating what it calls “anti-Israel bias” through education and media and campus campaigns. The ZOA sponsors numerous cultural and educational programs both in the U.S. and in Israel itself. Ideologically, this pro-Israel group sits on the far right, and for example it decisively rejects the idea of any form of Palestinian statehood.

Propaganda efforts are also a focus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), another pro-Israel lobbying organization founded in 1913 with an official mission to fight defamation of the Jewish people. During the 1970s the ADL began promoting the notion of the so-called “new anti-Semitism,” by which anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel were defined — no less, no more — as forms of anti-Semitism. In that way many Jewish intellectuals and other Jews who spare no critique of Zionists and Israel were automatically accused of anti-Semitism. The ADL is not only a lobbying group; it also presents itself as a civil-rights organization — but that, most likely, is merely a cover for another form of pro-Israel advocacy.

More recently the pro-Israel lobby has opened a whole new front by mobilizing various Christian Zionist movements. The largest among these groups is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, which claims to have more than 10 million members — which, if true, would make it the biggest pro-Israel organization in the United States. CUFI — which describes itself as an evangelical organization — is known for its mass “Nights to Honor Israel” solidarity events and for prayer groups called “Daughters for Zion.” Most of CUFI’s work is tied to grassroots campaigns and direct contacts with politicians who can influence legislation. It is precisely evangelical eschatological beliefs — the idea that Jews must return to Palestine, rebuild the Third Temple, and restore its rituals and sacrifices so that the Second Coming of Jesus can occur — that are the main reason CUFI members feel such a strong imperative to defend Israel. However, this evangelical belief departs significantly from the convictions of most other Christians.

What is perfectly clear is that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is organized to reach virtually every target group imaginable — Republicans and Democrats alike; conservatives and liberals; hawkish militants and those who prefer diplomatic solutions; advocates of unilateral approaches to the Palestinian issue and supporters of multilateral solutions; proponents of direct action and those who favor educational strategies — and finally both Jewish and Christian Zionists. This is almost certainly not accidental but rather the result of a sophisticated strategy devised outside the U.S. Pro-Israel lobbying organizations may not — because of certain ideological splits — form a homogeneous, monolithic bloc, yet the way their activities align produces a dynamic, composite lobbying force whose combined media, financial, and political power is large enough that, despite internal disagreements, it can be regarded as a single instrument of Israeli influence on American foreign policy. Criticism of this destructive influence, of Zionist ideology, and of the State of Israel itself is not a recent phenomenon within the American Jewish community. What could be considered a genuinely new trend, however, is the dramatic and sustained rise in the intensity and visibility of these criticisms in American society — and these are to a much greater extent a reaction to Israel’s actions than a simple reflection of a sharper generational divide within the American Jewish community. Research shows that younger American Jews are increasingly critical of Israel and more often prioritize the country in which they were born and live, which is natural and understandable. For that reason, arrogant remarks by Israeli politicians have an increasingly provocative effect on younger generations of American Jews, especially among emerging intellectuals. Recall, for example, Netanyahu’s now-famous 2001 remark — made during a conversation with settlers in a private setting, apparently unaware he was being recorded:

“I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved in the right direction… They won’t get in our way.”

This video was first released in 2010 on Israel’s Channel 10, and shortly afterward The Washington Post published an article commenting on Netanyahu’s boast — a boast that unfortunately is grounded in real events. What Netanyahu and many other Israeli politicians failed to grasp is that such statements backfire on Israel, rallying the entire patriotic American public — a constituency that increasingly includes younger, well-educated Jews. The extremist rhetoric of Netanyahu and other Israeli hawks meets increasingly sharp pushback from the American public every day, and particularly from the Jewish community, which feels a growing sense of responsibility regarding the crimes of the Zionist state. When it comes to Jewish criticism of Israel’s malign influence in the U.S., the opinions of Jewish intellectuals carry enormous moral and ethical weight, and therefore deserve special attention and respect. Among observers who lack deeper knowledge, it is commonly assumed that Jewish criticism of Israel in the U.S. is the lonely voice of idealists, leftists, or liberals — but nothing could be further from the truth. It would be far more accurate to say that there is a pattern whereby authentic Jewish intellectuals — those who meet the strictest possible standards of moral and ethical integrity — are, by virtue of that integrity, predisposed to be vigorous critics of Israel and of its lobby in the United States.

A prime example is the force of Max Blumenthal’s criticism of Israel — Blumenthal is an American Jewish journalist, editor, author, blogger, and filmmaker, born in Boston in 1977. The value of his work rests on his marked tendency to ground his claims in solid arguments and extensive documentation, as well as in reports, video recordings, and photographs gathered during on-the-ground reporting — he is definitely not an armchair journalist. Blumenthal‘s major works include the books Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013) and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (2015). Both are based on periods he spent in Gaza and in parts of the West Bank under harsh Israeli occupation. His conclusions about Israel are extremely sharp — he claims the Jewish state is becoming a totalitarian, fascist regime with clear racist and genocidal intentions. He also spares no criticism for the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which he publicly portrays as the greatest threat to free speech in the West. In January of this year, Blumenthal harshly attacked outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken at his final press conference in that role, accusing him of having allowed genocide against Palestinians — the Holocaust of our time. Because of such incendiary rhetoric, and like many other American Jewish intellectuals whose Jewishness is undisputed, Blumenthal has been labeled an “anti-Semite” by the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. — a charge that is, of course, absurd and utterly ridiculous.

Max Blumenthal, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where he studied history, is the founder and editor of the news website The Grayzone, which in many ways reflects his strongly anti-imperialist ideology and a fairly open sympathy toward Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran — and even toward Hamas, which he, unlike Israel, calls a resistance movement rather than terrorists. The Grayzone, although an alternative platform, has demonstrably significant global influence when it comes to criticizing U.S. foreign policy and its allies. Like many other Jewish intellectuals, Blumenthal openly supports the nonviolent, non-profit, pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which — as its name implies — promotes boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel, calls for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territories, and demands a permanent end to apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against Palestinians. Max Blumenthal is probably the fiercest American Jewish critic of Israel. Among other things, he advocates that Israel should be permanently dismantled as a state and cease to exist, and emphasizes an insider perspective — claiming that, as some may not know, he is a de facto part of influential Jewish elites.

Another fierce critic of Israel is Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist and activist born in 1953 in New York City to Jewish parents who were both Holocaust survivors—his mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, and his father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. Finkelstein earned his undergraduate degree at Binghamton University and later received a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. He has spent most of his professional career teaching at institutions such as Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University. The history of his family influenced him to devote a large portion of his scholarly research to the Holocaust, but the work that brought him wider public attention—both inside and beyond the United States—concerns his thorough analysis of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, or, more precisely, the Palestinian tragedy that has unfolded over the past century. Finkelstein has described his academic project as an attempt to forensically expose the pseudo-scientific theories and arguments of predecessors who worked in the same fields. Over time these intellectual efforts made him one of the most outspoken critics of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Accordingly, Norman Finkelstein does not hesitate to call Israel a Jewish supremacist state and to say it is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people; he even describes it as a ‘satanic state’ that seems to have come out of the boils of hell. In his book Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018) he documents in detail and vigorously condemns Israeli crimes in Gaza. However, Finkelstein became widely known to the general public in 2000 when he published The Holocaust Industry, in which he argued that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby misuse the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II as an ideological instrument that grants them immunity from fully warranted criticism today. By underpinning his claims with rigorous documentary evidence—including primary sources and official reports—Finkelstein has shown that his criticisms of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby cannot be dismissed, since they have clear scholarly substance and merit.

A work of comparable scholarly importance is that of the American professor, linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky, born in 1928 in Philadelphia to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. His family’s working-class background strongly shaped his ideological outlook and helped make him, over time, one of the most influential figures on the global left. Very early on he felt a moral obligation, as an intellectual, to expose the American corporate elites and the manipulative media under their control. That same sense of moral responsibility shaped his attitude toward Israel, even though he was raised in an environment steeped in Jewish cultural values. In 1953, as a young, left-leaning idealist, Chomsky spent several months at Hashomer Hatzair’s HaZore’a kibbutz during his stay in Israel. Although he later remembered that period as containing pleasant days, he also admitted he was profoundly appalled by Jewish nationalism and racism, especially toward Arabs. This early and very unpleasant experience deepened in subsequent years and, combined with his research-based analysis of global geopolitics and American imperialism, helped form his stance toward the pro-Israel lobby and toward Israel itself — which he views as an American strategic military foothold projecting Washington’s power into an otherwise permanently unstable Middle East.

In his works The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983), Middle East Illusions (2003), Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War against the Palestinians (2010), and On Palestine (2015), Chomsky argues that Israeli actions in the occupied territories are far worse than apartheid, and that those mass Israeli crimes against Palestinians would not be possible without U.S. support and assistance. At the same time, he acknowledges the other side of the coin, accusing the pro-Israel lobby in the United States of driving Washington’s disastrous Middle East policies, including toward Iran. He explicitly identifies and emphasizes that the activities of AIPAC and other similar pro-Israel lobbying groups are responsible for manipulating American foreign policy not only to the detriment of Palestinians but, above all, to the detriment of U.S. national interests. The greatest strength of Chomsky’s arguments lies in their consistent reliance on a broad analysis of international relations — he views Israel and the pro-Israel lobby as integral parts of a much larger geopolitical picture.

Consistency is one of the foremost qualities of American writer, political activist, and commentator Phyllis Bennis, who was born in 1951 in Los Angeles. Raised in a Jewish family, she explicitly identifies as an American Jew, yet as she matured intellectually she also emerged as one of the most prominent anti-Israel activists in the United States. As director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, Bennis has focused her research primarily on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and on the role of the United Nations in that region. She is a founding member of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, has served on the board of Jewish Voice for Peace, is an active participant in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and has advocated a one-state solution under which Palestine — within the borders that existed during the British colonial administration — would become a civic, democratic state in which all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, race, or religion, would enjoy identical human, civil, and political rights. All of this has positioned Phyllis Bennis as a key anti-Israel activist within the American Jewish community.

Her public criticism of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, and her strong opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, stem from her leftist and anti-imperialist ideological convictions; for that reason her arguments sometimes receive insufficient attention in ideological circles of other persuasions. However, Bennis relies not on rhetoric but on factual argumentation to make her forceful case about the special character of the U.S.–Israeli alliance — an alliance that, she argues, grants Israel special protection and de facto impunity on the international stage because it can count on Washington’s unreserved support. According to her analysis, AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbyists in the United States have created a political environment in which criticism of Israel is effectively taboo, since U.S. politicians, fearing electoral consequences, adhere to those rules of the game: candidates who cannot expect financial backing from the pro-Israel lobby have very slim chances of winning. Bennis clearly exposes the channels through which U.S. taxpayers’ money is used to procure advanced military technology that Israel ultimately employs in its massacres of Palestinians. She is a signatory of ”A Statement From Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC,” in which a significant portion of the American Jewish intellectual community condemned the activities of that pro-Israel lobbying organization as deeply harmful to the country’s vital national interests. The undeniable force and persuasiveness of Phyllis Bennis’s anti-Israel critique derives from the fact that her core expertise is precisely the analysis of U.S. foreign policy, and that she consistently grounds her arguments in international law and ethics.

Norman Solomon is another fearless left-wing, American Jewish anti-Israel activist, journalist, media critic, and author. Born in Washington in 1951, Solomon came under FBI surveillance as a teenager. After finishing high school, he devoted his life to progressive activism. Shortly thereafter, because of civil disobedience during one of the numerous protests of the anti-nuclear movement in which he took part, he was arrested and spent 40 days in jail. During the 1980s, Norman Solomon traveled to Russia eight times as the leader of an American activists’ group, the Alliance of Atomic Veterans, and led demonstrations in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow calling on the United States to join the USSR in halting nuclear weapons tests. Solomon’s turbulent activist youth later matured into political and intellectual stature that at one point brought him close to the U.S. Congress; he served as national director of the activist organization RootsAction and was the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, whose core mission is to provide journalists with alternative information sources.

In his fierce critique of AIPAC, Norman Solomon — like many of his compatriots and fellow activists — publicly identifies as Jewish, thereby making clear that he feels entitled and fully qualified to speak out about that and similar pro-Israel lobbying groups. The professional orientation of Solomon’s media interests shaped the main thrust of his criticism of the Israeli lobby. Much of his work focuses on exposing AIPAC’s role in a propaganda war that — by stifling the right to criticism and public debate — manufactures a false national consensus, which in turn secures unconditional American support for Israel regardless of the incontrovertible crimes of the Zionist state. Solomon, like Bennis, is also one of the important signatories of ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC.” Because Solomon’s critique of Israel and the Israeli lobby in the U.S. is grounded in exposing mechanisms of propaganda and media manipulation, it carries particular weight and force. Solomon often stresses that American Jews support only governments that respect all human and civil rights, including the right to self-determination; this is his universal ethical message, which he frames as a separation of Jewish identity from Zionist racism.

In a similar vein, Sara Roy — an American Jewish political economist and scholar at Harvard University, where she served as a Research Associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies — felt a powerful moral imperative to distinguish her family’s Jewish heritage from the crimes of the racist state of Israel. Roy was born in 1955 in West Hartford, where she grew up and graduated from Hall High School. Much like Finkelstein, Sara Roy’s life is in large part defined by being the child of Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. As she grew up, Roy visited Israel repeatedly, which gave her direct insight into the tragic and complex nature of Arab–Israeli relations and helped form an early awareness of parallels between how the Nazis treated Jews in the 1930s and 1940s and the conduct of Israeli soldiers toward Palestinians in modern times.

As a scholar and political economist, Roy has devoted her research to studying how Israel’s occupation policies undermine the Palestinian economy and society as a whole. Like Blumenthal, Roy conducted fieldwork on the ground, which is one of the many reasons she is widely regarded today as a leading academic authority on Gaza and Hamas. Although Roy does not claim that Israeli crimes against Palestinians are historically equivalent to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, she emphasizes that such parallels are unnecessary because the brutality of Israeli repression is unmistakable. At the same time, Roy openly deplores the near-unconditional support that organized segments of the American Jewish community give to Israeli acts of brutality, describing that reality as unbearable. The force of Sara Roy’s anti-Israel arguments is multilayered: they rest on decades of scholarly expertise, direct experience from Gaza, and the moral authority she derives as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. For all these reasons, Roy’s academic critique of Israel is a powerful appeal to the broader Jewish community to reconsider the values it promotes.

It was precisely through a process of reexamining his own value system that Peter Beinart — once a liberal Zionist and an apologist for Israel — gradually became one of the most influential, and even fairly radical, American critics of Israeli policy and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

A journalist, political columnist, and professor, Peter Beinart was born in 1971 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a family of Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He studied history and political science at Yale College and international relations at University College, Oxford, where he earned an M.Phil. He was formerly an editor of The New Republic, has written for Time and The Atlantic, and is now a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York; he is editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, a columnist for The New York Times, and a political commentator for CNN and MSNBC.

Much like Solomon and other Jewish intellectuals, Beinart reached a point in his life — in his case as a result of academic maturation — when he felt compelled to redefine his Jewish identity in light of the troubling political reality that Israel represents for humanity at large, and especially for Jews themselves, who however much they try, cannot escape the sense of responsibility that ties them fatefully to the Zionist state. The strongest evidence of Beinart’s development into a genuine public intellectual is the vast ideological gulf between his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2006), which defended liberal support for American interventionism against the perceived threat of “Islamic totalitarianism,” and his fourth book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, published in January 2025, in which he publicly urges the entire Jewish community to confront the immorality of their defense of Israel and the fact that nearly the whole of Jewish cultural heritage has been misused to justify mass slaughter and starvation in Gaza.

A former Zionist who apparently experienced a catharsis of personal political and moral awakening, Peter Beinart now openly calls Israel’s actions in Gaza by their proper names, and accuses the American Jewish lobby of complicity in crimes against Palestinians. He is one of those Jewish intellectuals — like Bennis — who believes it is necessary to form a single, democratic, civic state in which Palestinians would have exactly the same human, civil, and political rights as Israelis and all other citizens. Once a mainstream analyst, Beinart has transformed into a fierce critic of AIPAC, particularly of its strategy for maintaining bipartisan consensus, which has stretched the definition of what counts as a pro-Israel position into an ideologically elastic and ambiguous category. It is therefore unsurprising that he also signed ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC.”

Part of the power of Beinart’s critique lies in the fact that, when confronting pro-Israel mainstream propaganda, he makes skillful use of that same language and vocabulary — because he knows it well — which makes the presentation of his new political vision far more effective. His argument is strategically designed to bridge the gap between young Jews, who are generally highly critical of Israel and pro-Israel lobbying, and older generations who still idealize the Jewish state and elevate its ethno-nationalism above authentic Judaism. In short, what Beinart is attempting could be described as a desperate effort to save the honor of Jewishness from the crimes of Israel — and he does so by defending the human, civil, and political rights of Palestinians.

Similarly, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, is professionally invested in the same Palestinian rights. Her criticism of Israel is not rooted in ideology or emotion but rests firmly on principles shaped by her deep expertise in international law and human rights. She sharply condemns Israeli policies of occupation, war crimes, widespread bombing, targeted assassinations, collective punishment of Palestinians, and other breaches of international law. At the same time, Cohn points out that the pro-Israel lobby exerts tremendous influence over Congress and U.S. policy more broadly, which, among other effects, effectively pressures Washington into aggressive actions against Iran. Cohn observes, with resignation, that U.S. administrations and politicians have simply capitulated to that pressure. She described Israel’s attack on Iran in June of this year as a violation of the UN Charter, warning that U.S. participation in that unjustified military operation was entirely unlawful because it contravened U.S. constitutional and statutory law. She is also a persistent critic of American militarism and of U.S. complicity in Israeli actions against Palestinians.

Cohn’s public activism is an illustrative and moving demonstration that Jewish identity should not be an obstacle to examining and analyzing the actions of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States from a standpoint grounded in universal moral, ethical, and legal principles. Cohn is one of the signatories of the public statement “Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza,” which in October 2023 was signed by nearly 800 leading scholars and experts in international law. She also signed ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” and is a strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

One very active participant in the BDS movement — and another important signer of ”A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” — is the American actor, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter Wallace Shawn. He was raised in a Jewish family and describes himself as an atheist who nevertheless retains strong ties to Jewish identity and culture. Shawn says that this heritage and his ethical convictions motivate him to speak out about the most serious political problems. That conviction has made his criticism of Israel very direct and unflinchingly candid. Shawn does not hesitate to compare Israeli actions in Gaza to the crimes of Nazi Germany, calling them diabolically evil. In a statement he made in February of this year, he emphasized that one of the worst things is that Israel openly boasts about its crimes, unlike Hitler, who at least had the “decency to try to keep it secret.” At the same time, Shawn urged the world to know that Israel is starving people, preventing children from receiving necessary medical care, and bombing hospitals. Wallace Shawn’s moral position is effectively unimpeachable, because he builds his critique of Israel on principles of Jewish ethical teaching and argues that there are many people like him who simply have not yet dared to say so publicly.

Judith Butler, the American Jewish philosopher, author, and a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, certainly did not lack that kind of courage. Her scholarly work in general — and her critique of Israel and of Zionism — have attracted substantial visibility and respect within parts of the American Jewish community and in the broader American intellectual public. The foundation of her critique is rooted in post-structuralist philosophy, and its particular force lies in her ethical and intellectual consistency. Butler explains that consistency by noting that, as a Jew, she was raised with an ethical imperative to speak the truth. Consequently, she draws a clear and unambiguous distinction between Zionism — as an ethno-nationalist political project — and Jewishness, or Judaism, understood as the authentic ethical and universalist identity of Jews.

In her important book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Judith Butler sharply criticizes attempts by exponents of Zionist ideology to appropriate Jewish identity and to impose a nationalist interpretation on it. Those decidedly anti-Zionist positions form the logical and theoretical basis of her critique of Israel and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Butler is one of the few leading Jewish intellectuals who has had the courage to openly describe Israeli policy toward the Palestinians as genocide. Unsurprisingly, she is a signer of “A Statement from Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC” and one of the most committed and active participants in the BDS movement; in that capacity she advocates the complete dismantling of Israel as a state and the return of Palestinians to their homeland. It is also notable that Judith Butler is a prominent critic of Islamophobia — a stance that coheres with her broader anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist views — and that she has described Hamas and Hezbollah as progressive social movements. Unsurprisingly, these positions have made her a frequent target of sharp Israeli criticism.

The American Jewish professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Richard Falk, had an even more unpleasant experience with Israeli authorities. In 2008 the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed him to a six-year mandate as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories. In subsequent expert reports to the UN, Falk characterized Israel as an apartheid state with genocidal tendencies. It is important to note that Falk’s definition is presented as grounded in international law and, for that reason, is offered here as a legal assessment. Beyond being a legally framed and professionally prepared critique of Israel, his analysis is rooted in principles of humanitarian universalism and informed by direct personal experience. Richard Falk was already known for his sharp criticisms of Israel when he assumed the UN Special Rapporteur post, and he immediately clashed with the Israeli government and with pro-Israeli lobbying organizations. Israel promptly announced that it would bar Falk from entering the occupied territories, and the Anti-Defamation League called on him to resign as UN Special Rapporteur. He nevertheless remained steadfast in his assertions and in his UN work, establishing a legal framework that has brought criticisms of Israel in international politics into the domain of crimes against humanity — a legacy that could prove highly significant in the near future.

In a sense, the arrival of an era in which Israel can no longer rely on the United States’ permanent veto of Security Council resolutions — because the scale of opposition at the United Nations to a Holocaust against the Palestinians is now very close to reaching a critical mass that could neutralize America’s apparent complicity in that atrocity — was foreshadowed by the article “How the UN Can Act Decisively to End Genocide in Gaza” by American Jewish anti-war activist Medea Benjamin, which she co-authored with Nicolas J.S. Davies. That, perhaps, really could be the path that opens the way to a final end of the Palestinian tragedy — one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in human history — for which some responsibility, proportional to people’s actions and failures to act, lies with all of humanity.

An array of prominent Jewish intellectuals — who possessed a strong sense of moral and ethical responsibility, and above all the courage to raise their voices against Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States — includes so many distinguished figures that listing them all would require a multi-volume publication. In this piece, because of severe space limitations, it was absolutely impossible to give each person the attention they deserve — the selection of names presented is meant only as an illustration and as a way to pay equal honor to all their colleagues who, regrettably, could not be mentioned. The sharp critiques of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby from dozens of brilliant American Jewish thinkers testify to their moral need for deep self-examination and for a redefinition of Jewish identity through a complete separation from Zionism as a regressive, extremist, supremacist, and racist ideology — a monstrous perversion of what modern Judaism ought to be. At the same time, these thinkers almost unanimously condemn the sterile U.S. foreign policy that, having fallen into the clutches of the Israeli lobby, has become an active accomplice in the genocide of the Palestinians. The shared and essential message from these exceptional intellectuals to all of us is to be patient and to hold on a little longer, because the time is inevitably coming when all decisions affecting not only the Middle East but the future of humanity will be made by people like them — voices that refused to be silenced, guided not by fear but by truth.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
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May 28, 2022
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September 13, 2025
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September 11, 2025
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September 13, 2025
Charlie Kirk: Zionist martyr or scapegoat?
September 13, 2025
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September 12, 2025
Iryna Zarutska case: The United States lacks mental hospitals, but prefers to discuss race
September 6, 2025
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September 4, 2025
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September 2, 2025
In Brazil, the Black Movement imitates Zionism in order to conflate race and religion
September 1, 2025
Israel’s ‘new, violent Zionism’ as a harbinger of Imperial geo-politics of submission and obedience
August 27, 2025
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September 13, 2025
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September 15, 2025
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September 9, 2025
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September 5, 2025
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September 14, 2025
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September 13, 2025
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September 8, 2025
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The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
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