It is important to know the origins of the Israeli lobby to realize the significant sway it has had on American politics and politicians. For that, we have to go back in time to post-World War II history.
To begin to correct the injustices that generations of Palestinians have faced, and to become “a society that can live with its conscience,” the story of Palestine and its people must be told.
After the Second World War, the United States made the decision to tie its destiny to the ethno-nationalist settler-colonial state of Israel. And since then, the Palestinian people have stood alone in their struggle.
The establishment of Israel was a violent process that has never ended. Beginning in 1947, Zionist paramilitary forces launched large-scale attacks on Palestinian towns and villages, leading ultimately to the Nakba (the catastrophe)—the culminating stage of the Zionist ethnic cleansing project.
During the Nakba, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, 15,000 Palestinians were murdered, 800,000 were forcibly driven from their homeland to the West Bank, Gaza Strip and to neighboring Arab countries, and 70 massacres were committed.
Before Israel’s declaration of statehood on May 14, 1948, Zionist militias had committed numerous massacres, whose histories have largely been suppressed:
- Baldat al-Sheikh, December 31, 1947: 70 Palestinians massacred.
- Sa’sa, February 14, 1948: 16 houses and their 6 inhabitants blown up.
- Deir Yasin, April 9, 1948: 107 killed, including scores of children, women and elders. Some victims were found maimed, raped and then killed. Masses of men were put on trucks and paraded across Jerusalem before being taken to a quarry to be executed. These atrocities were committed by Irgun and Stern Gangs led by Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, respectively, who would later become prime ministers of Israel.
- Abu Shusha, May 13, 1948: Despite efforts of the residents to protect their homes, the village fell to occupation; 60 Palestinians massacred.
During the 1948 war, Zionist and Israeli forces committed more than 30 documented massacres in Palestine. Israeli military historian, Uri Milstein, has suggested that there were more than 100. In ensuing years, Israel continued its campaigns of forced displacement and massacres.
Notably, it was the Qibya massacre of October 14, 1953 that gave birth to what would become the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Born in the blood of the natives of Palestine, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has spared no efforts to insure that Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians be kept hidden from the American people.
It is important to know the origins of the Israeli lobby to realize the significant sway it has had on American politics and politicians. For that, we have to go back in time to post-World War II history:
Harry S. Truman is president of the United States and running for reelection with few prospects and little support; until the Israeli lobby literally enters the campaign in the person of Abraham Feinberg, a hosiery/manufacturing magnate. And the rest, as they say, is history—Israeli history.
The man who made Truman’s 1948 election victory possible explained how it was done in an interview conducted in 1973 for the Harry S. Truman Library—“Oral History Interview with Abraham Feinberg.” He stated in the interview that “without Truman, Israel would have had very difficult days and times trying to even come into existence.”
Israel’s American enforcers faced challenges during the Eisenhower years (1953-1961) from an administration inclined toward a more nuanced policy. During the president’s first year in office, news of the massacre in the Palestinian village of Qibya sparked widespread disapproval.
Time magazine, for example, carried the story describing how Israeli soldiers “shot every man, woman and child they could find, then turned their fire on the cattle;” reporting also that soldiers were seen “slouching in the doorways of Palestinian homes, smoking and joking.” Sixty-six people were killed that night, 45 were blown up in their homes that had been dynamited by soldiers. The New York Times ran excerpts from the United Nations Mixed Armistice Commission—in charge of the 1949 truce— deploring the act as “coldblooded murder” and refuting Israeli lies about the assault.
Israel’s defenders quickly gathered for damage control. Isaiah L. Kenen, founder of the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (AZCPA), the forerunner of AIPAC, wrote of the ill effect it would have on what he called “our propaganda.”
To manage the Qibya fallout and to prepare for future cover-ups, Kenen created AZCPA in 1954. Under his leadership, the group grew stronger and richer when it joined with the new Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, an association of top Jewish leaders who promoted Israel’s interests with US politicians, that included presidents and secretaries of state.
Influencers like Abraham Feinberg and Kenen were instrumental in selling Israel to Americans and influencing policies favoring Israel. By the time Kenen died in 1988, AIPAC had gained an outsized role in shaping US policy in the Middle East.
Over the years, AIPAC has demonstrated that nothing will diminish its vested interest in Israel, including genocide. Since 7 October 2023, the death and destruction Israel’s defenders have been willing to accept are woefully incomprehensible. For example, 26 days into its bombardment of Gaza, the Israeli military had dropped 25,000 tons of bombs (American made), on 12,000 targets—50 bombs dropped every hour. By that date, Gaza had been bombarded with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs over an area smaller than Hiroshima in 1945. Israel has also used banned cluster and white phosphorous munitions, that can cause permanent environmental damage.
The pain of that destruction was explicit in the words of 61-year-old Gazan farmer, Sami Abu Amir, trying to revive a patch of his once productive ground: “It is as if they wanted to kill the land before they killed us.”
After dropping more than 85,000 tons of toxic bombs on the small enclave for 15 months, it is obvious that Israel intended to poison the soil, to make Gaza uninhabitable for survivors.
A November 2024 report published by the Environmental Quality Authority—an independent agency established in the 1990s by the Palestinian Authority—concluded that as a result of the bombing, the soil of Gaza has become so polluted with toxic chemicals that it will “hinder agriculture for decades.”
Unable to defeat the Palestinian resistance with bombs and lethal ground forces, the Tel Aviv regime has reimposed a total blockade once again on Gaza, returning to its October 2023 weapon of war—starvation and deprivation. In addition to halting humanitarian aid, Israel threatened the resistance with additional consequences if they refused to extend phase one of the January ceasefire agreement and accept its new proposal.
It is clear that Israel has no intention of putting an end to this human catastrophe that has been in the making for over 80 years. There will be no resolution until Palestinians recapture their land.
Against this history and backdrop, Arab “leaders” met in Cairo on March 4, 2025 to find a “day after” plan for the quagmire Israel and the United States have weighted the region with in Gaza. Essentially, Israel destroys and the Arab world, not Tel Aviv, is expected to pick up the tab of reconstruction.
American politicians and Israel’s influencers lack an understanding of Palestinians’ connection to and determination to remain steadfast on their land. It is the force that has enabled them to withstand unimaginable hardships. The inseparability and steadfastness were expressed by those who survived the genocide, returning to what was left of their homes, determined to rebuild.
Amir Karaja, for example, told CNN that he would “rather eat the rubble” than be forced to leave his homeland; and Khan Younis survivor, Ahmed Safi, stressed that “We prefer Gaza’s hell than the paradise of any other country…if we are given all the money in the world, we won’t leave this land.”
When discussing the Palestinian experience and identity, the words of Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), remind us that “The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.” To the detriment of Palestinians and the entire region, Israel and its defenders are determined the metaphor never becomes a political reality.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
