New book documents how Citizens United reshaped AIPAC's money machine, tracking $104 million in super-PAC spending since 2025

Federal Election Commission records show that the United Democracy Project, the super-PAC founded by AIPAC in 2021, spent $104 million between January 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026. In August alone, the group put $2.5 million into opposing Afghan-American candidate Aisha Wahab in a Northern California congressional runoff for the seat vacated by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Those figures anchor a new book, Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, by investigative journalist Eli Clifton and retired political scientist Ian Lustick, reviewed this week by Responsible Statecraft. The book argues that the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC did not create the pro-Israel lobby's influence in Washington but rewired its mechanics.

Before Citizens United opened the door to super-PACs and unlimited independent expenditures, AIPAC itself did not donate to candidates. According to the authors, its leadership instead directed wealthy members toward candidates who backed Israel-aligned positions, with contributions routed through local PACs such as Badger PAC and Gold Coast PAC. Members of House and Senate committees overseeing foreign aid could expect contributions tied to their votes on aid to Israel.

That model has been supplemented, the authors write, by a newer layer of national super-PACs waging independent campaigns. Mark Mellman founded Democratic Majority for Israel in 2019. AIPAC followed with the United Democracy Project in 2021. Clifton and Lustick identify nine megadonors, including Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Yass, Larry Ellison, Haim Saban, the late Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer, who have made more than $1.7 billion in disclosed contributions toward unconditional support for Israel since 2012, a figure that excludes undisclosed dark money.

The book also revisits Abraham Feinberg, a major funder of Harry Truman's 1948 campaign whose donations, the authors say, bought him access to shape Truman's approach to the new Israeli state. The authors describe Feinberg's role as modest by current standards.

One claim in the book carries a lower evidentiary bar: the authors report that the Adelsons' 2016 contributions to Donald Trump came with an understanding that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and relocate the U.S. embassy there. Trump did both after taking office, but Occupation Watch notes that the quid-pro-quo characterization is the authors' framing of a reported understanding, not a documented agreement.

The book also revisits the 2006 Mearsheimer and Walt essay that first named this influence network, and the backlash it drew.

The Anti-Defamation League denounced the essay as "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control."

Twenty years on, Clifton and Lustick argue the mechanics they describe, now running through FEC-registered super-PACs rather than backroom persuasion, are simply easier to document than they once were.