The point of the political campaigns aimed at countering the pro-Israel group is to silence and isolate Jews, not opposition to a mythical all-powerful lobby.
The myth of the “Israel Lobby” has come a long way from its dusty origins at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an essay published in the London Review of Books in 2006, and then a book published in 2007. Written by academics John Mearshemier of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, it purported to describe a vast conspiracy of individuals and organizations all working together to steer American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction against what they considered to be the country’s best interests.
At the heart of this conspiracy theory was the notion that the main pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, was at the center of a cabal that was, in their formulation, composed of just about everyone who mattered in foreign policy, politics and the media.
A moral panic over Jewish money
That this inflated the organization that, then and now, was actually far from being one of the most powerful or wealthy players in D.C. lobbying, into an entity that seemed to be pulling the strings of both major political parties, was absurd. But that hasn’t prevented AIPAC from becoming the focus of a moral panic about the role of money in politics.