Starred review from July 8, 2024
For decades, vociferous lobbying has kept Britain and America’s political classes committed to supporting Israel, according to this piercing study. Israeli historian Pappé (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine) begins by tracing Zionist lobbying’s origins in the 19th century, when Christian Zionists, who sought to hasten the Second Coming, teamed up with Jewish Zionists—motivated by nationalist fervor and a desire to help Europe’s Jews escape antisemitism—to persuade the British government to establish a Jewish state. Pappé’s narrative then moves to the U.S., where, after WWII, neo-conservatives joined with Christian and Jewish Zionists to convince politicians to back Israel as a bulwark against communism. Later chapters cover the Zionist lobby’s 21st-century battles against pro-Palestinian leftists, including its labeling of U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite, resulting in his 2020 ouster. Pappé’s fine-grained narrative weaves together many probing lines of inquiry: he spotlights what he characterizes as cognitive dissonance among 20th-century Zionist advocates as they attempted to justify increasing violence against Palestinians, reveals how Zionist lobbying shaped political culture in America and Britain (with its “focus on wining and dining,” Zionist lobbying was “in many ways... the forerunner of all modern-day lobbying”), and shows how the lobby has had a chilling effect on politicians’ ability to deal with Israel’s abuses of Palestinians (Barack Obama, for example, wrote in his memoir that his administration was stymied by the pressure). This offers a vital international perspective on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.