How Aipac drives US policy and shields Israel’s genocide on Gaza
For decades, Aipac has turned financial power into political leverage, shaping US foreign policy, steering congressional votes, and insulating Israel from accountability
On 7 November 2023, the US House of Representatives voted to reprimand Michigan state representative Rashida Tlaib for allegedly "promoting false narratives" on Israel's war with Hamas and attack on Gaza. Tlaib is the sole Palestinian member of Congress.
Of the 22 Democrats who joined nearly every Republican member in voting in favour of the resolution, at least 14 took campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in 2022.
In total, these lawmakers received $900,000. Republicans have similarly raked in massive donations from Aipac, which spends millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to push pro-Israel stances.
For more than half a century, Aipac has operated at the intersection of lobbying and geopolitical engineering — translating campaign financing into policy capture and shaping the US' Middle East posture with almost unilateral force.
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Today, amid Israel's relentless assault on Gaza — widely described in political discourse and activist movements as genocide — Aipac stands accused of underwriting not just political careers in Washington but the very infrastructure of impunity that has allowed the war to persist.
Foreign lobbying without disclosure
Aipac's origin story reveals its disregard for transparency. Its predecessor, the American Zionist Council (AZC), was ordered to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) in 1962 for funnelling millions from Israel's Jewish Agency to influence Congress.
Instead of complying, Isaiah Kenen, the founder of AZC, rebranded the organisation as Aipac in 1963, reconstructing its financial flows through US donors rather than Israeli institutions to sidestep foreign-agent disclosure rules.
This structural opacity has persisted. Declassified FBI files from 1984 documented Aipac collaborating with Israel's Ministry of Economics, using stolen US trade data during negotiations of the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement.
Two decades later, Aipac staffers Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman were charged with transmitting classified Pentagon intelligence to Israeli officials. The case collapsed, but the episode underscored the thin divide between lobbying and espionage.
In 2018, leaked Israeli Justice Ministry documents reportedly expressed concern that Aipac's foreign coordination could trigger Fara scrutiny, prompting contingency planning to mask institutional links further.
A political machine powered by money
Aipac has evolved from an influence broker to a campaign finance juggernaut. Through its political arms — Aipac PAC and the United Democracy Project — it has poured unprecedented sums into US electoral races.
After its 2022 launch into direct campaign spending, the lobby became one of the largest outside funders in congressional elections, targeting more than 80% of the 469 house seats up for election that cycle. It celebrated victories online with the refrain, "Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!"
Its strategy is unambiguous: Flood races with funding to defeat candidates critical of unconditional military support for Israel. In 2022, it helped remove progressive Democrats Andy Levin (Michigan) and Marie Newman (Illinois) from Congress — both vocal critics of US arms to Israel. Its campaign against Levin, a Jewish lawmaker, was particularly symbolic: a warning that ethnic or religious proximity to Israel offers no shield against political reprisal if one challenges the lobby's red lines.
Ahead of 2024, Aipac announced plans to spend $100 million to reshape Congress, funded heavily by Republican megadonors and allies of former US president Donald Trump, while publicly claiming bipartisan credibility.
Silencing pro-Palestinian voices
The Gaza war has rearranged domestic political fault lines, but Aipac has countered dissent with money and pressure. Pro-Palestinian advocacy groups are outspent by orders of magnitude. The American-Arab Anti-Defamation Committee, one of the largest US Palestinian advocacy spenders, spent under $10,000 on Meta ads in late 2023 — pale against pro-Israel organisations such as "Facts for Peace," which spent $450,000 targeting young US voters with disinformation framing Hamas and sanitising Israeli violence.
A Harvard-Harris survey showed US voters under 35 overwhelmingly oppose Israel's assault on Gaza, yet Aipac's political spending seeks to reinforce the opposite consensus in Congress. Aipac is actively trying to replace public will with chequebook politics.
Political immunity for genocide
The brutality unfolding in Gaza has fractured America's public discourse, but not its political establishment. Aipac's machinery has helped secure near-unconditional US military, diplomatic, and financial backing for Israel even as civilian casualties mount.
A US-funded proxy plan known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) proposed confining 600,000 Palestinians in a so-called "humanitarian city," while Boston Consulting Group drafted parallel proposals envisioning the "voluntary relocation" of Gaza's entire population and transforming the enclave into a US "trusteeship". Nearly 2,000 Palestinians were reportedly killed at GHF aid sites, some by US mercenary-linked security contractors.
The language of humanitarian reconstruction, critics say, has become a polished veneer for mass displacement and exterminatory logic. Even the staunchest anti-Aipac politicians are not immune. When it came to military aid for Israel in 2025, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) voted against the overall defence appropriations bill that contained the funding; however, she created controversy by voting against an amendment to cut $500 million for the defensive Iron Dome system, a vote she defended as a stand against cutting defensive aid while maintaining her fight to block offensive US munitions to Israel. Later, she had to clarify that she has never received any donation from Aipac.
Manufacturing consent, crushing dissent
Aipac's role is not limited to campaign finance. It also shapes who gets moral legitimacy. At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the absence of a Palestinian-American speaker despite deliberate diversity programming triggered backlash. Observers blamed pro-Israel lobbying pressure shaping stage-access decisions.
The lobby's retaliatory muscle was on full display when US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Aipac entered a fundraising confrontation over "Gaza genocide" claims, signalling not a clash over humanitarian concern but over narrative ownership. Greene publicly argued that Israel could destroy its enemies "to the point of genocide" without US aid, framing her critique not in solidarity with Palestinians but in nationalist resentment over spending. Even in opposition, Palestinian lives are secondary; control of rhetoric is the battlefield. And yet, she faced massive backlash from Aipac.
Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian candidates are smeared, underfunded, or blocked. Anti-Zionist Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh lost his race amid a climate of intensified pro-Israel spending and pressure.
The people vs the politicians
While Congress remains locked into Aipac's orbit, US civil society has moved in the opposite direction. In Los Angeles alone, 20 months of sustained protest have shut down highways, interrupted speeches, forced campus walk-outs, and made Gaza politically unavoidable.
Activists frame their resistance as a continuation of the struggle against settler colonialism that began with the 1948 Nakba, now facing what Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich described openly as plans to "level all of Gaza."
Polling underscores the gap between streets and state. Younger Americans overwhelmingly reject Israel's conduct in Gaza, yet the political class operates as if the opposite were true — because private funding, not public consent, determines legislative survival.
Aipac's defence of Israel is not just advocacy. It shields military expansion, blocks accountability, polices acceptable speech, finances electoral outcomes, pressures party leadership, and rewrites foreign policy priorities around Israeli strategic goals. It does so while avoiding foreign agent registration, disclosing no directives, and operating with financial opacity that would be unthinkable for any other foreign-aligned lobby.
Critics argue that it has turned US democracy into a subcontractor for Israeli national strategy: US weapons finance the war, US diplomats block censure, US lawmakers silence objections, US PACs punish opposition, US media narratives are mass-purchased, and US voters are bypassed entirely.
