The Invisible Soldier

By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on June 24, 2025

On June 13, amid growing internal and external questioning of the genocide committed against the people of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched a military attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran using aircraft and missiles. As has been repeatedly stated since then, this move would not have been possible without the political, economic, and military support of the United States, even though Washington, D.C., has tried to claim otherwise.

The obvious conclusion for any observer is that the US continues to support an ally that it helped to emerge as a state, that it has assisted in all its previous confrontations with its Middle Eastern neighbors, that it sends record amounts of military aid to every year, and that it has protected from all its violations of nuclear proliferation and other international commitments.

However, it would be a mistake to consider Israel a mere pawn of US interests in the region, or that each and every time the US has assisted it, it has been because of a strategic and tactical coincidence of interests between the two countries.

Very few studies have been devoted to comprehensively analyzing the influence and actions of the Israeli state on its “big brother,” with the aim of gradually ensuring that this alliance has a much broader foundation than that provided by the common interests of the elites and that it takes root both in society as a whole and in the broader spectrum of the political class. It is not just a matter of defining common objectives, but of carving them in stone through mechanisms ranging from personal commitment, alliances of the most petty interests, intelligence and technological actions.

According to various documents, since 1948, when the British, Americans, and others promoted the emergence of the state of Israel at the expense and to the detriment of Palestinian sovereignty, various actions have been taken from Tel Aviv to progressively expand its borders, consolidate its regional dominance, and militarily shield the nation, to become almost impregnable to an external enemy.

From very early on, the Israeli authorities understood that their most formidable goal in the future would be to ensure that there was no questioning within American society that Washington’s support should be constant and unrestricted under any circumstances. Over the years, there have been occasional differences between these partners, which, having been overcome many times in a discreet manner, have taken the bilateral relationship to another level, in which the distances between their positions have been increasingly reduced.

When discussing Israeli influence within the United States, the first example that almost always comes to mind is the existence of the so-called Jewish lobby, which should really be referred to as Zionist, the various institutions that comprise it, and the depth with which each one penetrates the underbelly of US power.

The three main organizations that make up this lobby are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC; Christians United for Israel (CUFI); and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CoP).

By reviewing the transformation and growth of AIPAC over time, one can get an idea of the qualitative change and structural refinement that Israeli influence has had on the United States, above and beyond the actions that have been taken for the same purpose in the opposite direction.

The matrix of what is now AIPAC was created in 1954, under the name American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (AZCPA), precisely at a time when there could have been a turning point in the United States’ unconditional support for Zionist excesses. That year saw the so-called Oibya massacre, in which 69 Palestinians were killed, sparking significant international condemnation, including a UN Security Council resolution.

The AZCPA was the successor to the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), which initially advocated Jewish migration to Palestine during World War II, leading to the eventual creation of the new Jewish state. After that goal was achieved, the AZEC became the American Zionist Council (AZC) in 1949, which immediately began to manage official aid to Israel, a goal that was permanently achieved in the 1960s.

It could be said that from then until the Six-Day War in 1967, or until the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, there was a first phase in the experience of this series of pro-Israel organizations, with objectives and success limited to American society and the political class. In the mid-1970s, AIPAC was an organization with only 12 permanent employees in Washington and a budget of less than half a million dollars. Today, it has more than five million members in all 50 states of the Union.

The 1980s proved to be a unique period in the organization’s existence, as it was investigated by the Ronald Reagan administration for alleged (or actual) acts of espionage and theft of official documents during the bilateral negotiations to reach a free trade agreement between the two countries, which was finally concluded in 1985. On the international stage, between 1981 and 1989, the United States supported 21 United Nations resolutions condemning Israel’s actions against its neighbors, particularly Lebanon, Iraq, and Tunisia.

At a time when the United States was developing new military ties with regional actors such as Saudi Arabia, or initiating discreet contacts in what would later become known as the Iran-Contra scandal, Israeli special services were actively operating on US territory and around the country’s diplomatic missions abroad. Although Israel’s best-known case of espionage against the United States was that of Jonathan Jay Pollack (1986), it was not the only one, nor was it the most complex. The CIA went so far as to register and monitor nearly 200 Israelis working in US institutions or diplomatic missions and at the time described Mossad as the second most active service against the country and the first among its “allies.”

In these circumstances, AIPAC and its contacts in Tel Aviv fundamentally shifted their priorities, working harder and in a more coordinated manner on the US Congress. While AIPAC managed to blackmail many politicians for their alleged anti-Semitic (rather than anti-Zionist) sentiments, the organization focused on ruining the lives of several legislators, who became emblematic cases for the rest, such as Paul McCloskey (R-Ca) and Paul Findley (R-Ill). In other cases, they achieved a radical change of heart behind closed doors and with a little budget, as was the case with Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC).

A long journey began in which AIPAC went from making small contributions to specific political campaigns to having its own Political Action Committee (2021), which has extensive relationships with both Democrats and Republicans and, in the last three presidential terms, has financed the professional aspirations and personal interests of top US executives and members of the congressional leadership. Despite this, AIPAC has never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (1938) governing organizations operating in the United States.

AIPAC Tracker, a US organization dedicated to tracking the contributions of the Zionist lobby in US election campaigns, estimates that in the last presidential cycle, it invested between $45 million and $50 million in congressional seats (361 pro-Israel Democratic and Republican candidates) and more than $200 million specifically for Donald Trump’s election.

The efforts of AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations were credited with the success in 1998 of the first ten-year commitment to fund US economic and military aid to Israel. In 1999, the figure reached $26.7 billion, rising to $30 billion in 2009 and $38 billion from 2019 onwards.

This is Washington’s largest annual disbursement to Tel Aviv, although it is not the only one, as there are other non-public budget items. This large amount of money has been linked to several corruption cases on the Israeli side for diverting funds to undeclared objectives, ranging from specific military projects to private pockets.

Additionally, thanks to AIPAC’s efforts, in 2008 the US Congress passed into law a commitment to guarantee Israel’s so-called Qualitative Military Edge, understood as the ability to confront and defeat conventional military threats with minimal damage and casualties, obliging the US president to issue an official statement on the matter on a regular basis.

If one accesses the multitude of public media outlets that AIPAC has at its disposal to promote its interests, it becomes clear that its objectives are aimed at convincing the US public that:

– It is an “American value” to promote bipartisan support for the US-Israel relationship.

– This is a “mutually beneficial” relationship that saves lives and contributes to American interests and values.

– The United States is a “safer” country when Israel is strong.

– Israel faces a magnitude of “unprecedented threats” stemming from “instability” in the Middle East, particularly from the strengthening and nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

AIPAC and its Israeli partners use a wide variety of channels to embed these messages in American society. The range of options extends from the organization’s annual conferences, a profusion of reports and briefings on various topics, school programs, and scholarships abroad.

A cultural factor that contributes to the dissemination of these messages is that an estimated 190,000 people of Israeli origin live in the United States, in addition to 7.5 million Jews of various backgrounds. It is understood, however, that in both cases these are communities with diverse political approaches to the implementation of a Zionist agenda.

To all the influence described so far, we must add the economic component, which also supports perceptions of Israel generated within American society. Bilateral trade between the two countries was estimated at $37 billion in 2024, with a deficit for the United States. There are 2,500 US companies in Israel, while Israeli companies are the second largest foreign group on the NASDAQ index of the New York Stock Exchange, with a total greater than Indian, Japanese, and South Korean companies combined. Israeli investors own shares in 1,000 US companies spread across 48 states. Israeli direct investment in the US economy reached $36.6 billion in 2019.

With all these strengths in its favor, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government began a military response to Hamas’ actions in October 2023, which immediately turned into a genocide against the entire Palestinian people. The Israeli leadership skillfully exploited the proverbial incompetence of Joe Biden (a self-confessed and willing Zionist) and the Democratic debacle in general to obtain a series of additional aid packages on top of those regularly approved and almost unrestricted political support from the US political class. It seemed like a win-win scenario that would help solidify Netanyahu’s domestic image.

However, the brutality of the attacks, the immense number of civilian casualties, especially children, and the violation of all ethical norms in the treatment of the attacked, generated international rejection of Tel Aviv that became particularly marked within the United States, a trend that continued to rise during the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term.

A poll published by Gallup on March 6 found that only 46% of the sample expressed support for Israel, the lowest percentage in 25 years, while sympathy for the Palestinians rose to 33%. In addition, another Pew Research Center poll in April indicated that 53% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Israel, a figure that was 37% among Republican voters but rose to 69% among Democrats. Among the latter, those under 50 years of age registered a 71% rejection rate.

Israel was beginning to suffer losses on a front where it could not afford to retreat: US public opinion. The economic and political efforts of AIPAC and its allies were not proving sufficient. The figures did not improve, no matter how much Israel attacked “regional enemies” based in Lebanon, Syria, or other destinations.

It was therefore necessary to generate a conflict, to attack an enemy sufficiently demonized to provoke a more or less immediate reaction of support that would reverse these trends. Within hours, the argument about Iran’s nuclear program, which had been simmering for 23 years, was recycled, and an unprecedented attack on that country was justified, quickly enlisting as an accomplice a US hierarchy that combines ignorance, corruption, and ineptitude like few before it.

Regardless of the most immediate paths this confrontation takes, the involvement of more or fewer actors, and the permanent danger of mistakes leading to further escalation, the so-called Jewish (Zionist) lobby and its permanent agenda of influence within the United States, which is supposed to be its main ally, must be counted among the main actors on the current stage.

 José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English