The Israel lobby (if there even is one) is merely a distraction from the Qatar lobby — perhaps the most pernicious foreign influence inside America today.
A decade ago, a colleague and I developed a proposal for a project that would provide legal representation to Christian, Yazidi, and other ISIS victims then residing in the U.S. against those who had materially cooperated in the terrorism they had endured.
There was considerable evidence that wealthy individuals and even some governments — one prominent among them — had financed the terrorists, especially in Syria and Iraq, using various financial institutions and transfer mechanisms along the way, in violation of several U.S. laws. The goals were to punish the financiers, compensate the victims, and deter such conduct in the future.
We approached a law firm led by a distinguished attorney, someone we believed, as a former public servant and avowedly devout Christian, would be sympathetic. At the second meeting, a snag arose: The firm could not, or perhaps would not, represent the victims pro bono.
Months later, that law firm was retained by Qatar. The firm had sold its services to one of the leading financiers of extremism, which precluded the firm from pursuing legal action against Qatar or individual Qataris who funded U.S.-designated terror groups, and made their lawyers aware of possible legal vulnerabilities. It was a bitter reminder that Beltway ruthlessness can know few limits — and that the most influential also tend to be the quietest.
Foreign influence has been a challenge since America’s Founding, when domestic factions often favored alliances with either Britain or France. In recent years, the malign influence of adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran has made headlines. But it is Israel’s putatively disproportionate (and putatively malign) sway over U.S. foreign policy that has been the most enduring controversy.
This has been especially so since professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007. The book invigorated Israel critics on the left and right, who, like the authors, have lamented “the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.” It became increasingly difficult to know where conspiracy theory ended and respectable criticism began.
The term “Israel lobby” implies foreign influence. In fact, it is no such thing. It is, rather, a decentralized mix of American civil society groups and individual citizens, mostly non-Jews, exercising constitutional rights — domestic influence, then, not foreign. The lobby is seldom of one mind and seldom speaks in one voice. For all its attention amid the incessant clamor of clashing interests in Washington, the Israel lobby does little to distinguish itself.
Qatar, by contrast, garners little attention but wields considerable influence in American institutions. While he was serving at the State Department in 2019, Charles Asher Small, now the president of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, shared the ISGAP’s “Follow the Money” project. The study traced the flow of $5 billion from Qatar to American universities since 2001.
The top ten higher education recipients of Qatar’s billions, according to the 2019 ISGAP report, were Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Texas A&M, Yale, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and the University of Chicago. Many significant gifts from Qatar remain undisclosed, as do donations to campus-affiliated institutes and student groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine and BDS, while some gifts are made via intermediaries. Yet the disclosed figures alone are staggering.
In July 2019, ISGAP’s findings were made public at an event at the Department of Justice. Qatar was undeterred. The following year, during the pandemic, Qatar expanded its influence across public and private sectors and bought over a half-billion dollars in D.C. real estate along the way. The tiny petrol monarchy, whose average citizen’s wealth is more than ten times greater than the average American’s, exercises profound influence without the knowledge of most Americans.
It seems reasonable to ask: If the Israel lobby is so powerful, why was the U.S. unable to persuade Qatar, which hosts both Hamas leadership and the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, to orchestrate the release of Israel’s hostages? Americans might also ask: Why, if the U.S. is indeed the superpower, couldn’t it even get the American hostages released? There is, quite simply, a profound disparity of influence.
To give some sense of the disparity: In 2023, AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel organization in the U.S., spent $3 million on lobbying. Qatar spent more than five times that figure on lobbying alone, while also heaping hundreds of millions on universities, campus groups, nonprofits, think tanks, and law and public relations firms.
What can the Trump administration and Congress do to curb foreign influence, particularly of the malign variety such as that which Qatar wields? To start, they might take administrative and legislative steps to prevent lobbying by foreign states; regulate the interplay of foreign lobbyists and think tanks; require institutions that accept public funds to disclose foreign donations; and force colleges to choose between foreign gifts and taxpayer subsidies.
The administration can also reinstate policies undone by the Biden administration. That would include the think tank transparency policy, which required organizations accepting foreign money that sought to influence State Department policy to disclose that fact to U.S. officials and on their website.
In 2014, grisly images of ISIS holding jumpsuit-clad Americans they later beheaded dominated the news. Few Americans knew that Qatar’s intelligence apparatus had the power to get at least one of them released; the rest were savagely murdered. A decade later, as images of Israeli (and American) hostages emerged from Gaza, few Americans knew that Qatar, once again, had influence with the terrorists — the same terrorists Qatar had funded.
Nor do most Americans know the extent of Qatar’s influence in Washington. Or higher education, nonprofits, think tanks, and lobbyists. It seems fair to ask: If the Israel lobby is so effective, why can’t it persuade Americans and their leaders to take a harder line with Qatar?
The Israel “lobby’s” biggest mistake was trying to convince the world it existed. Qatar didn’t have to persuade anyone its lobby didn’t exist: it just had to purchase the services of influential people in law, academia, think tanks, and other domestic powerhouses. These include people who are former U.S. government officials. If there were an Israel lobby worthy of our attention, there wouldn’t be a Qatar lobby. As it is, the Israel lobby (if there even is one) is merely a distraction from the Qatar lobby — perhaps the most pernicious foreign influence inside America today.