Israel's Lobby 2.0: What Walt & Mearsheimer didn't anticipate

In their new book, Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick chart the evolution of this powerful special interest and its unmatched influence in the US

John B. Judis

Aug 26, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-lobby-book/?

In March 2006, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," as a "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control."

In their essay, which was the basis of the book of the same name that appeared the next year, Mearsheimer and Walt had been careful to distinguish the Israel lobby from a lobby by and for Jews, but it was to no avail in the furor that the essay and book provoked.

Two decades later, as the United States and Israel wage a senseless war against Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt's case for the inordinate influence of Israel and the Israel lobby over American foreign policy looks pretty good. So does their contention that the policies promoted by Israel and its lobby are not in America's interest.

Eli Clifton, an investigative journalist who has documented the lobby's influence, and Ian Lustick, a retired political scientist and expert on the Middle East, have written a worthy sequel to Mearsheimer and Walt's book, entitled "Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power". Like Mearsheimer and Walt, they use the term "lobby" to refer to a "loose network" of groups, media outlets, and wealthy individuals. They do an excellent job of explaining how this lobby has grown and altered its approach over the last two decades.

As Clifton and Lustick show, the lobby has changed the way it tries to influence election outcomes. Before the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which opened the door to super-PACs and unlimited contributions, AIPAC and affiliated groups tried to influence elections and elected officials through campaign contributions. But AIPAC itself did not contribute to candidates or officials. Instead, its leadership urged its members, which included the very wealthy, to back certain politicians and to oppose others based on whether they had backed or opposed measures that were in Israel's interest. Members of the House and Senate committees that oversaw foreign aid could expect generous contributions if they backed aid to Israel. Donors gave these contributions directly to candidates and to sympathetic local PACs like Badger PAC or Gold Coast PAC, which in turn doled them out to candidates.

In the last decade, national groups that support Israel's government have established their own super PACs that wage independent expenditure campaigns either for or against candidates. In 2019, Mark Mellman founded Democratic Majority for Israel. In 2021, AIPAC founded the United Democracy Project. These committees have spent huge sums. According to Federal Election Commission records, the United Democracy Project has doled out $104 million between January 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026. In August, the UDP alone spent $2.5 million to oppose an Afghan-American candidate, Aisha Wahab, in a runoff for the northern California congressional seat vacated by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.

In the past, wealthy American supporters of Israel's government also exercised influence as individuals. Businessman Abraham Feinberg was a major funder of Harry Truman's 1948 campaign, which gained him access to Truman and allowed him to influence Truman's policy toward the new state of Israel. Feinberg was, however, small potatoes by current standards. During the last decade, what Clifton and Lustick describe as a "small set of megadonors" have backed unconditional support for Israel. Clifton and Lustick highlight nine donors, including Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Yass, Larry Ellison, Haim Saban, the late Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer, who have contributed over $1.7 billion in disclosed contributions since 2012. These contributions, they note, do not include undisclosed "dark money."

Some of these contributions, like those from the Adelsons, directly affected policy. The Adelsons’ contributions to Donald Trump in 2016 were reportedly based on an understanding that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which he did upon taking office. While AIPAC and the formal lobbies have influenced Congress, the megadonors have specialized in winning over the executive branch.

The groups supportive of Israel's government have also changed how they have made their case for supporting Israel. When Mearsheimer and Walt were writing their book, the groups could still rely on widespread public support for Israel. If anything, the pro-Israel set in American politics had grown to include Republican evangelicals as well as Democratic liberals. Labeling politicians as "anti-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian" could discredit them. In AIPAC's successful 1984 campaign to unseat Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.), for instance, one of the groups sent around a mailer describing Percy as "Israel's worst adversary in Congress."

But as Israel's popularity has plummeted in the wake of its disproportionate response to Hamas's October 7, 2023, massacre and to Israel's continuing expansion in the Palestinian West Bank, the groups have had to resort to deception and diversion against Israel's critics.

Instead of engaging the arguments of Israel's critics, groups like the ADL, American Jewish Committee, the Adelson-backed Brandeis Center for Human Rights and Law, and watchdog groups like CAMERA and the Canary Mission began charging Israel's critics with antisemitism. "Their goal was not to win debates about Israel," Clifton and Lustick write, "but to prevent discussion about it." They successfully lobbied the Biden and Trump administrations to endorse an official definition of antisemitism that included criticisms of Israel. The Trump administration used charges of antisemitism to bludgeon liberal universities and law firms they disliked. It would be surprising if Clifton and Lustick escape being charged with antisemitism for exposing the machinations of the Israel lobby.

The groups have also altered their campaign strategy. In their advertising, the UDP and allied PACs have eschewed mention of American policy toward Israel. Instead, they have attacked candidates they opposed by citing their stands on whatever issues might resonate with the relevant electorate. In their ads this year against Wahab, the groups advanced a spurious claim that she had made "teenage girls more vulnerable to predators" by opposing a sex trafficking bill in the state legislature.

In Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, AIPAC ran ads claiming that Abdul El-Sayed "disrespected women." None of the ads mentioned Israel. This tactic seemed to work in 2024 campaigns AIPAC and the groups waged against then-Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), but as the Iran War has deepened discontent with the U.S.-Israel alliance, it failed against Wahab and El-Sayed. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed's Republican opponent in the general election, even requested that AIPAC drop its plans to support him with ads against El-Sayed.

As Clifton and Lustick show, the groups composing the Lobby have seen a sharp growth in their staffs and revenues over the quarter century. AIPAC and its educational foundation enjoyed a "fivefold increase in revenue between 2000 and 2022.” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (an AIPAC spinoff) increased its revenues from $5.2 million in 2001 to $21.9 million in 2023. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which led the charge in 2015 against the Iran nuclear pact, increased its annual haul from $1.12 million in 2001 to $17.8 million in 2022. Along with the megadonors, the Israel groups enjoy the support of wealthy foundations, including the $256 million Koret Foundation and the $220 million Swartz Foundation. But the growth of revenue has not been matched by a growth in influence. If anything, the lobby's influence has declined, forcing it to resort to deceptive advertising and incendiary accusations.

There are two parts of Clifton's and Lustick's argument about which I wanted to read more. The first has to do with situating the lobby in American politics. Clifton and Lustick accept Mearsheimer and Walt's definition of the Israel lobby as "the loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." That might have been OK in 2007, but in 2008, Jeremy Ben-Ami founded J Street, which billed itself as "pro-Israel," and which has attempted to move American foreign policy in a completely different direction from AIPAC and the other "pro-Israel" groups that Mearsheimer and Walt had assigned to the lobby. The lobby Clifton and Lustick describe represents one interpretation of what it means to be "pro-Israel."

As Clifton and Lustick note, the lobby has gradually shifted rightward in American politics and in its view of Israel. AIPAC, which was initially run by liberal Democrats and had its base in the Democratic Congress, began moving toward the Republicans in 1982, when it made Robert Asher its president. In 1993, it replaced its executive director Thomas Dine, a former aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), with Howard Kohr, a Republican operative. In its early days, AIPAC was aligned with Israel's social-democratic Labor Party, but it has moved closer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its aim for a Greater Israel. It harried Barack Obama's attempts to achieve a two-state solution. Its PAC has not merely targeted harsh critics of Israel like El-Sayed, but liberal Zionists like former Reps. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) and Tom Malinowksi (D-N.J.).

And it's not just AIPAC. The constellation of groups is now weighted toward Republican proponents of a greater Israel. It includes Christians United for Israel, which boasts a larger membership than AIPAC; a revived, Adelson-funded Zionist Organization of America; and the Republican Jewish Coalition, which dwarfs its Democratic counterpart. The funders have also tilted rightward. In the 1970s, AIPAC's president and major donor was real estate developer Larry Weinberg, a liberal Democrat close to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Clifton and Lustick's lobby still includes major Democratic donors including Saban, but more of the money is coming from Trump supporters like Miriam Adelson, Yass, Singer, and Ellison.

In short, the lobby is increasingly part of a conservative, pro-Trump Republican faction that backs the right wing of Israel's politics. It is opposed not only by the Democrats who support J Street — or beyond that, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — but also by a growing group of Republican conservatives who believe that in his support for Israel, Trump has betrayed his commitment to "America First." I would have liked to know more about the political debates that took place inside AIPAC in the 1990s when it shifted most decisively rightward and in AIPAC and other groups during the Trump years.

What I would have also liked to read more about is the precise relationship between the lobby and the Israeli government. AIPAC, the main group in question, grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was founded in 1949 and was funded by the Israeli government. In 1963, in response to demands that it register as a foreign agent, AZC changed its name to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and rewrote its charter to exclude foreign contributions.

Since then, as far as is known, AIPAC has no financial or other legal ties to Israel's government or institutions. But Clifton and Lustick suggest that the lobby is "the agent of a foreign power." The title of their book is similarly provocative. They called it "Israel's Lobby" rather than "The Israel Lobby," and they subtitle the book, "America in the Grip of a Foreign Power." That implies that the lobby is subordinate to the Israeli government, even if it is not financed or staffed by it.

They give one example of how that relationship has worked, citing a quote in a book about U.S.-Israel relations from an unnamed Israeli diplomat who served when George Shultz was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State. They wrote that the Israeli diplomat:

came up with the idea of "turning Israel into a Major Non-NATO Ally. We told AIPAC, which started rolling the idea up and down Capitol Hill corridors until it was accepted."

They also cite what an Israel official, unaware that he was being recorded, said in 2015 to an American audience about the government's efforts to get the Senate to oppose the Iran nuclear arms deal. "We have the FDD. We have others working on ...data gathering, working on activist organizations, money trail."

They summarize the relationship in this way: "Israeli government operatives do not control the organizations ... Israeli officials send signals that guide the behavior and the rhetoric of Lobby leaders and thousands of activists." But these two examples don't go far enough in making that case. The first is from a single source decades ago, and the second is ambiguous. What does "having FDD" mean? One wants to know whether the staff or the leadership in these groups have relationships with people in Israeli government ministries who send them signals. Are there examples of Israel's government persuading one of the groups to do something it had not thought of doing or was wary of undertaking?

Answering these questions about the group's political evolution or its precise relationship to the Israeli government would have required trying to get people who have worked in these groups to talk candidly about what went on. That kind of journalism is, perhaps, beyond the call of duty for this book.

What Clifton and Lustick have provided is a comprehensive and much-needed account of how the groups and individuals that make up the lobby have attempted to influence American politics and policy. That's quite an achievement, and anyone interested in America's relationship with Israel should pick up Clifton and Lustick's book.

Baiting Turkey: Israel’s Strategy in Syria

by Thomas S. Karat | Aug 31, 2026

https://original.antiwar.com/thomas_karat/2026/08/30/baiting-turkey/

The base at Abu al-Duhur had been dead for thirteen years. Wrecked in the Syrian war, out of service since 2012, its runways cratered and its hangars stripped, it sat in Idlib province about 60 kilometers from the Turkish border, useful to no air force. On the night of August 18 eight Israeli missiles fell on it. Israel said it had struck to stop Turkish troops from moving in.

Six days before the strike, Israel had gone to Washington with the same warning. Its intelligence, it said, indicated there might be Turkish movement into the airfield. The Americans took the warning and ran it down through their own agencies. Tom Barrack, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Ankara and his envoy for Syria, described what came back. “We all did our due diligence. We went back to our respective intelligence agencies. The answer we got is, no, that’s not happening.”

Then Barrack said the thing an envoy is not supposed to say in public about an ally. “One theory is they were just baiting Turkiye.” He called the strike aggressive and timed, and he named what it was timed to. Israel votes on October 27.

Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, called Barrack’s account “full of inaccuracies” and said the intelligence had been clear. Both cannot be true. Either Turkey was about to seize a derelict runway and the closest ally Israel has could not find the evidence, or it was not, and a NATO member’s base was bombed on a claim that dissolved the moment anyone checked it. The envoy who checked it settled the matter to his own satisfaction on a podcast, five days after the missiles landed, by guessing at the motive.

The motive was on a billboard before it was in the air. Along Tel Aviv’s main highway, above the traffic, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had appeared beside Iran’s supreme leader, the head of Hezbollah and the mayor of New York, under a single line: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.” Benjamin Netanyahu is the first sitting Israeli prime minister to be tried for corruption. His Likud has been falling in the polls. Trump has told him to wind down the wars on Iran and Lebanon that filled his last two years. A man who runs as the wall between his country and its enemies had run short of enemies he was still allowed to fight.

Turkey filled the gap, and filled it safely. Iran could be bombed toward collapse. Turkey cannot. It holds NATO’s second-largest army, its president has a warm line to the American one, and a quarrel with it can be conducted in airstrikes on other people’s territory and in warnings traded through the press, at no risk of a war that reaches Israeli cities. The opposition read the timing on sight. Yair Lapid, who backed the strike, ridiculed the noise around it: “if you struck, stay quiet.” Ehud Barak wrote that the whole escalation smelled of a plan to fight the election on a war footing.

What is less often said is that the man on the billboard had his own use for it. Through the past year Erdoğan jailed Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor who was his most dangerous rival, and opened a settlement with the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan meant to draw Turkey’s Kurds out of the opposition and clear the path to a new constitution, one that might let him run again after his term ends in 2028. An Israel behaving as an aggressor on Syrian soil handed him a cause under which Kurds, Islamists and nationalists could stand behind the same government. His officials called the strike “cheap politics” for Netanyahu, which it was, and treated it as a gift, which it also was. Barrack, once more on the record, said both leaders were “in a political campaign,” each running toward a vote, each knowing what his voters wanted to see. A confrontation with two authors is harder to call off than one, because calling it off costs both of them something at home.

None of which makes the underlying quarrel invented. A year before the strike, a committee Netanyahu had appointed under his former acting national security adviser, Jacob Nagel, told him to prepare for direct war with Turkey. The Syrian threat, the report said, “could evolve into something even more dangerous than the Iranian threat.” It urged raising the defense budget by up to 15 billion shekels a year and buying the long-range aircraft such a war would require. After October 7 Israel had already traded deterrence for prevention: not to wait for a threat and answer it, but to destroy it before it forms. Abu al-Duhur was that rule carried out on concrete. Hit the runway while it is still only a runway, before Turkish soldiers arrive and turn it into a piece of NATO. The rehearsal was on the record too. In the spring of 2025 Turkish teams had surveyed the airfields at T4, Palmyra and Hama for a deeper presence, and Israel had struck each in turn.

The legal cover was being drafted while the fires were still out at Abu al-Duhur. Two days after the strike a former Israeli official, Shay Gal, wrote in the Adelson-owned daily Israel Hayom that Turkish soldiers in Syria would be, in plain terms, targets. Article 5 of the NATO treaty, he argued, “protects Turkish territory; Turkish troops do not carry that territory with them” onto Syrian ground. Israel had acted, he wrote, “before Turkish military depth matured.” The paper is owned by Miriam Adelson, the largest single donor to the American president. An opinion column in such a place is not a fringe position tossed into the void. It is a balloon released over friendly airspace to see who salutes.

Underneath the doctrine and the theater lies something plainer, which is money. Turkey’s arms exports reached about 10 billion dollars in 2025, close to half again what they had been the year before, and climbed another 26 percent through the first seven months of 2026, to 11.2 billion dollars over the trailing year. Ankara now sells something near two-thirds of the world’s armed drones. The pitch it makes is the one Israel has made for decades to the Gulf and the wider Arab world: capable weapons, delivered faster and cheaper than the Western competition, to the same buyers. And the rivalry runs straight through Netanyahu’s own telephone. Before Trump flew to Ankara in July, Netanyahu called him to press him not to let Turkey back into the F-35 program or sell it the F110 engines its home-built KAAN fighter needs. To do so, he told Fox and afterward CNN, would “upset the power balance in the Middle East, which is ultimately guaranteed by Israeli air superiority.” The sentence is honest about what is being defended. Air superiority is a weapon over Israeli cities and it is also a catalogue, and the customers are the ones Turkey is taking.

The two designs for Syria cannot both hold on the same soil. Turkey wants a single Syrian state under Ahmed al-Sharaa, its Kurdish militias folded into a national army, its refugees sent home, its northern border shut. Israel wants Syria kept weak and split, its minorities shielded from Damascus, its south left open to Israeli entry. The foreign minister in Jerusalem has been clear that Turkish radar and air defense and aircraft would close skies that Israeli jets now cross at will, and would make a future strike on Iran harder to fly. Al-Sharaa, pressed from both sides, takes Turkish training and reconstruction while quietly thinning the Turkish-shaped units inside his own army, unwilling to become anyone’s client. Syria is not where the rivalry is happening. Syria is what it is over. The place it is most likely to tear is the Kurdish seam, where a force armed by Washington is being pushed into a state that Turkey wants it dissolved by, and that Israel would sooner see it armed against.

That Turkey is not Iran is the danger, not the reassurance. It carries NATO’s second army, a new mutual-defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and a president nearer to Trump than any in years. To bomb a base that Turkey backs is to strike at the rim of the alliance that underwrites Western security, and the alliance has no agreed answer for the morning after. The shield may bring the collision on rather than hold it off. If NATO membership tempts Ankara to push a little deeper into Syria, trusting that Israel will not risk hitting a protected army, and if that trust pushes Israel to strike sooner, before the protection attaches, the deterrent has turned into its opposite. Washington sees it. Barrack has spent weeks trying to build a channel among Israel, Turkey and Syria so that jets do not meet by accident. Israel does not want the channel. A formal mechanism, its officials fear, would set into intelligence-sharing and bind their hands, taking from them the freedom to strike whenever they alone decide a threat is forming.

Netanyahu once ran precisely such a channel with Vladimir Putin, to keep Israeli and Russian pilots from firing on each other over Syria, and it held for close to a decade. It worked because both sides wanted it to. This time one side is bombing empty runways two months before an election and filing the result under deterrence.

For a generation the region was arranged on the belief that Israel stood at its center, wired to Washington, its supremacy the fixed point the Abrahamic accords and all that followed were built around. That belief is coming apart. The strike on Abu al-Duhur was not the confident act of a power sure of its place. It was the nervous act of one no longer sure of it, a country cratering a dead airbase to prove a dominance that a NATO member’s drones and export ledgers are quietly taking away. The threat the missiles answered could not be found by the ally sent to look for it. What could be found was the billboard, the trial, the sinking polls, the rival in an Istanbul cell, the constitution still to be rewritten in Ankara, the engines Netanyahu wants Turkey never to hold. Two men who need the same war moved a step nearer to it, on land that belongs to neither, over a runway no one was using.

UK has billions in contracts with firms tied to illegal Israeli settlements

Al Jazeera investigation reveals UK public money flowing to companies linked to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

By Caolán Magee

28 Aug 2026

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/28/uk-has-billions-in-contracts-with-firms-tied-to-illegal-israeli-settlements

At least 17 companies linked to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank hold United Kingdom public-sector contracts worth more than 2.1 billion pounds ($2.85bn), an Al Jazeera investigation reveals.

The findings come as more than 140 UK Labour MPs are calling on the government to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements, a move Prime Minister Andy Burnham is considering.

Our analysis of procurement records, company filings and corporate disclosures found that businesses named by the United Nations over their involvement in illegal Israeli settlements – and companies those businesses ultimately own or control as subsidiaries – have secured contracts across the British public sector, including in areas such as road maintenance, transport, emergency services and driving licensing.

“Evidence is growing that the UK may be in breach of its international obligations … by continuing to contract with entities identified by the UN as providing assistance of this sort,” Stephen Humphreys, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, told Al Jazeera.

Data compiled by public procurement analysts Tussell, and shared with Al Jazeera, shows the 17 companies and entities hold 125 public-sector contracts with a combined award value of 2.129 billion pounds ($2.89bn).

Companies owned by Motorola Solutions, the United States technology and communications giant, account for more than 1.7 billion pounds ($2.3bn) of the total – the vast majority through its British subsidiary Airwave Solutions. Other contracts we reviewed are held by firms within four other corporate groups including Heidelberg Materials, a German multinational building materials company; the French engineering group Egis; the Spanish train manufacturer CAF and Chinese conglomerate Fosun.

A report by the United Nations Human Rights Office identifies the five corporate groups as involved in business activities related to illegal Israeli settlements.

Heidelberg Materials’ Israeli subsidiary owns a quarry on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, while Motorola is embedded in the security infrastructure of illegal settlements. Egis and CAF are involved in Jerusalem’s expanding light-rail network – a project activists say entrenches Israel’s control by integrating settlements into the city while further fragmenting Palestinian neighbourhoods.

Fosun International, whose subsidiary Breas Medical receives UK public money, also owns the controversial Israeli cosmetics manufacturer Ahava, which operates in the Mitzpe Shalem illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. Civil rights groups, including the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in the UK, decry Ahava as a firm that is “complicit” in the theft of Palestinian land and livelihoods.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful and said it must end “as rapidly as possible”. The court also placed obligations on other states “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.

That raises questions over Britain’s continued commercial relationships with the companies identified in Al Jazeera’s investigation, observers said.

‘UK government is propping up apartheid’

Humphreys believes that Britain may also be failing to meet its legal obligations by “failing to launch its own investigation into their activities, with a view to preventing them if necessary”.

The UK has also warned businesses against bidding for construction tenders in illegal settlements.

“Businesses should not consider bidding for construction tenders,” a government statement issued this month said, warning of “legal and reputational consequences” and the risk of involvement in “serious breaches of international law”.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Al Jazeera’s findings expose a contradiction between the UK’s stated position and its economic ties.

“Quite simply, the UK government is propping up apartheid,” Corbyn told Al Jazeera. “Every day, the UK deepens its complicity in Israel’s economy of occupation and, in turn, Israel’s economy of genocide.”

The Cabinet Office told Al Jazeera that individual public authorities make decisions to exclude suppliers case-by-case for each contract. It said public procurement in the UK should not be used to boycott suppliers linked to other countries unless formal UK sanctions, embargoes or restrictions are in place.

Here’s what we found about some of the companies involved in settlement trade:

Motorola Solutions: Tech embedded in illegal settlements

The UN identifies Motorola in connection with two settlement-related activities: the “supply of security services, equipment and materials to enterprises operating in settlements” and the “provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements, including transport”.

Al Jazeera contacted the Motorola Solutions group for comment but received no response.

It is the largest beneficiary of UK public money that we investigated.

Motorola’s subsidiaries are entrusted with providing communications equipment to the emergency services in the UK. The largest contract identified by Al Jazeera is held by Airwave Solutions, a Motorola subsidiary. The Home Office awarded Airwave an extension worth 1.562 billion pounds ($2.13bn) to provide the secure communications network used by police, fire and ambulance services across England, Scotland and Wales. Motorola Solutions UK separately holds contracts worth 123.9 million pounds ($170m), including a 36.5-million-pound ($49.8m) Ministry of Defence contract for Airwave radios, accessories and airtime.

Five companies now ultimately controlled by Motorola Solutions Inc – Airwave Solutions Ltd, Motorola Solutions UK Ltd, CRFS Ltd, 3TC Software Ltd and Noggin IT Ltd – hold 91 active UK public-sector contracts worth 1.726 billion pounds ($2.3bn), according to the latest Tussell data.

Motorola Solutions Inc and its Israeli subsidiary, Motorola Solutions Israel Ltd, were included when the UN Human Rights Office first published its database of businesses involved in specified settlement-related activities in 2020. Both remain in its latest version.

Official records provide a glimpse of how the company’s technology has been embedded in settlements.

Tenders from Mateh Binyamin Regional Council and the municipal corporation of Ariel, both illegal settlements, show Motorola command-and-control technology being used in security and surveillance infrastructure.

Motorola equipment has also been bought by the Israeli Civil Administration, the military body through which Israel administers civilian affairs in the occupied West Bank.

In 2005, the UN reported that Motorola supplied surveillance systems to settlements including Hebron, Karmei Tzur and Bracha.

Motorola’s relationship with the Israeli authorities continues today. An Israeli government procurement document obtained by Al Jazeera shows Motorola Solutions Israel was awarded a 25.5-million-shekel ($8.7m) contract in May 2026 to maintain approximately 19,000 police radios and provide encryption licences until April 2028.

Heidelberg Materials: A controversial quarry on occupied land

The UN has listed Heidelberg Materials over the commercial use of natural resources in occupied Palestinian territory.

In Britain, five Heidelberg Materials companies hold 25 public-sector contracts worth 184.79 million pounds ($252m). Almost all of that – 179.03 million pounds ($244m) – is held by Hanson Quarry Products Europe Ltd. Its contracts include 60 million pounds ($81.9m) from Westmorland and Furness Council for road surfacing and highway works between 2024 and 2027, and a 50-million-pound ($68.3m) surfacing maintenance contract with Somerset Council.

Its Israeli subsidiary, Hanson Israel, owns the Nahal Raba quarry, south of Qalqilya in the West Bank. The quarry sits on land belonging to the Palestinian villages of az-Zawiya and Rafat, according to Who Profits.

An official Civil Administration planning notice reviewed by Al Jazeera shows a proposal was approved to expand the site.

Who Profits, a group that researches links between the private sector and the economy in the Israeli-occupied territories, said the approval was granted on May 28, 2025.

Heidelberg told Al Jazeera that in 2023, Hanson Israel “ceased all activities at the Nahal Raba quarry and the associated asphalt plant and ready-mix concrete plant”, adding that only security personnel are present on site.

Egis: Selling transport infrastructure that supports settlements

French engineering group Egis provides another type of connection via transport infrastructure linking illegal Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem with the rest of the city.

The UN lists Egis in connection with the “provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements, including transport”.

Egis’s own material shows that its involvement in Jerusalem’s expanding light-rail network continues today, with the company website advertising a job for an engineering expert based in Jerusalem on its light-rail projects.

Jerusalem Transportation Master Plan procurement documents from 2017 also identify Egis Rail as its general consultant, responsible for supervising and coordinating planning and design work on the Blue and Green lines.

Jerusalem’s light rail crosses into occupied East Jerusalem and links illegal Israeli settlements there with West Jerusalem. UN reports have described the railway as “additional infrastructure serving the illegal settlement network” and said it further isolates occupied East Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied West Bank.

Egis told Al Jazeera it “formally expressed its disagreement with this inclusion” in the UN database.

In Britain, five companies and entities controlled by Egis hold six public-sector contracts worth 133.60 million pounds ($182.4m). Almost the entire amount comes from a single contract, with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency awarding Egis Projects UK Ltd a 133.23-million-pound ($181.9m) contract for enforcement services across Britain. Egis businesses also hold UK public contracts, including Galson Sciences, Helios Technology, Egis Transport Solutions and architecture practice WestonWilliamson+Partners.

CAF: Constructing project to continue into 2027

Spanish train manufacturer CAF is also involved in Jerusalem’s light-rail network. The company has disclosed that the 1.8-billion-euro ($2.10bn) Jerusalem project was awarded in 2019 to TransJerusalem J-Net Ltd, a firm owned 50 percent by CAF and 50 percent by Israeli construction business Shapir.

CAF said the project includes construction of the Green Line and extension of the existing Red Line, “which partially run through East Jerusalem”. The construction phase is expected to continue until 2027.

The UN identifies CAF over the “supply of equipment and materials facilitating the construction and the expansion of settlements” and the “use of natural resources, in particular water and land, for business purposes”.

Al Jazeera contacted CAF for comment but received no response.

Meanwhile, CAF has an extensive relationship with Britain’s public sector, including supplying trams for one of the country’s major urban networks. The West Midlands Combined Authority awarded CAF an 83.5-million-pound ($114m) contract for a new generation of trams for the West Midlands Metro. The contract runs until December 2027, according to Tussell data.

Fosun: Owner of a cosmetics company accused of excavating Dead Sea mud in occupied territory

Chinese conglomerate Fosun International is identified by the UN under the category covering the commercial use of natural resources, particularly water and land.

Its connection to the occupied West Bank centres on Israeli cosmetics manufacturer Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories. Fosun itself announced in April 2016 that it had agreed to acquire Ahava for 290 million shekels ($76.8m).

Fosun’s subsequent statutory reporting recorded Ahava as 99.46-percent owned.

A European Commission statement in 2018 said Ahava “does have operations in the settlement Mitzpeh Shalem, located in Occupied Territories”.

According to the Quaker-founded organisation, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), repeated site visits confirmed that Ahava’s former factory in the illegal Mitzpe Shalem settlement remained operational as of 2026.

The group said Dead Sea mud was excavated in the occupied Palestinian territory and initially processed at the site before being transferred to Ein Gedi for further production.

In Britain, Breas Medical, which is ultimately owned through Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical by Fosun International, holds two public-sector contracts worth 1.29 million pounds ($1.76m). Fosun International is the controlling shareholder of Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical.

Al Jazeera contacted Fosun for comment but received no response.

Islamophobia has become Israel's Trojan Horse to win over westerners

Andreas Krieg

26 August 2026 

Netanyahu and his ministers now work to turn European fear of Muslims into political capital

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-islamophobia-has-become-israel-trojan-horse-win-over-westerners

Israel's Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli has explained his own strategy more candidly than any critic could. 

Antisemitism, he told an interviewer, does not much interest the average European or American, whereas fear of "radical Islam" interests them "very, very much", and Israel therefore needs "to take advantage of that".

Here is a senior cabinet minister admitting that Islamophobia has become a Trojan Horse for Israel to win over European and American hearts and minds. 

And it is the clearest account yet of what his ministry has become under Benjamin Netanyahu; an office that once existed to protect Jewish communities abroad now works to turn European fear of Muslims into political capital for the Israeli government.

His ministry was built for the opposite work.

Diaspora affairs meant supporting Jewish communities, taking their guidance, defending them against the forces that genuinely threaten them. 

But while his predecessors asked what would keep Jews safe, Chikli asks what narrative can be weaponised to make an easier sell. The most effective selling point, he has concluded, is not Israel at all but fear of somebody else.

A civilisational war

Since its genocide in Gaza, the old case for Israel on its own merits has grown harder to make, and a new one has slipped into its place. Support Israel, the argument runs, because Israel is fighting the people coming for you next. 

In this narrative Israel becomes the forward operating base of a civilisational war, the frontier of what Chikli, in a 2024 interview with Jewish Insider, called the "Judeo-Christian world" set against a "red-green alliance" of the progressive left and Islam. 

He deliberately blurs the line between confronting violent groups and Islam tapping into the playbook of far-right populism, which is on the rise across the West. 

The company he keeps confirms as much.

Chikli has courted Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France, Spain's far-right Vox party, the Sweden Democrats, and Dutch populist Geert Wilders, every one of them a party built on hostility to immigration and to Islam. 

Paradoxically, the ministry designed to protect Jews from antisemitism has become a ministry of subversion, ripening the very audiences and networks on the far right that have been on the very forefront of Jew hate globally. 

In October 2025, days after two Jews were killed, one of them by police during armed response, outside a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, Chikli invited the English agitator Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and who has accumulated multiple criminal convictions and prison terms over the past two decades, to Israel, and hailed him as "a courageous leader on the front line against radical Islam".

Those protesting the visit at the time were not the progressive left Chikli likes to blame, but British Jews themselves.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council called Robinson "a thug who represents the very worst of Britain", and they dismissed Chikli as "a diaspora minister in name only" who had ignored the community he claims to serve. Jews in whose name he claims to act wanted no part in this endeavour. 

One prejudice in two coats

What Chikli followers often miss is that antisemitism and Islamophobia do not compete for a fixed ration of public sympathy.

They are the one prejudice in two coats. Each rest on the same premise that a minority may be judged and feared and shut out for its religion.

So a serious campaign against antisemitism would widen the taboo against demonising anyone at all, because that taboo is the only thing that has ever kept Jews safe.

Instead, Chikli has been narrowing it. His bargain invites his own minority to buy the illusion of a little safety by leasing itself to the forces massing against another.

History is unkind to any bargain with fascists. Minorities rarely prosper once a society begins sorting itself by who truly belongs, and the movement aimed at Muslims today has no reason to stop there.

Europe's far-right traditions have a habit of circling back to the Jews. Robinson proved the point within the week, railing online against "elitist Jews". My bogeyman’s enemy turns out to be still my enemy.

Then there are the values he claims to guard. Chikli casts Israel as the custodian of "Judeo-Christian civilisation", of truth, free choice and human dignity.

Take him at his word, and the case falls apart on his own terms. A state cannot preach the sanctity of civilisation while it normalises the dehumanising and mass slaughter of Palestinians.

It cannot raise the banner of religious liberty while it feeds movements whose appeal begins and ends in suspicion of another faith.

Israel’s "Ministry of Subversion" now sits closer to an illiberal, nationalist Europe than to the liberal order that once made Jewish life in the diaspora secure.

The useful idiots

Meanwhile, those on Europe’s far right are more than just useful idiots played by Israel. Europe's populists collect an asset money cannot buy - namely a Jewish endorsement that shields them from the charge of antisemitism and lets them dress hostility to Muslims as plain realism.

Netanyahu's government collects politicians who will defend its war in Gaza and stand against Palestinian advocacy. Fear of Muslims is the coin they trade in. 

In his interview Chikli did not suggest Europeans need to fight antisemitism but swap one fear for another to fill a deep-seated European yearning for a significant other against whom to define its identity.

An institution built to bind Israel to Jewish communities has decided that the easy road to defending the undefendable rhetoric and action of the Netanyahu's government runs not through making Israel more persuasive but through making Europeans more afraid.

And it asks Jews to hand their safety to the very politics of collective suspicion their own history should have taught the West to dread.

No one has ever defeated the hatred of one people by bankrolling the hatred of another. 

Sino-American Relations: From Fragile Thaw to Renewed Friction

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 27, 2026

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/sino-american-relations-from-fragile-thaw-to-renewed-friction/

While the tenor of U.S.-China relations cooled somewhat from the hysteria of Donald Trump’s first term and the Joe Biden years, recent events have made clear how thin that veneer of stability remains. President Trump’s May 2026 state visit to Beijing and the planned September 24 White House meeting with Xi Jinping briefly suggested a shift toward “strategic stability.” Reciprocal visits returned to the agenda, and open talk of full decoupling subsided. That moment already looks precarious.

This week the Trump administration expanded its Iran-related sanctions campaign—“Operation Economic Outcast”—and swept up dozens of smaller mainland Chinese and Hong Kong entities involved in oil shipping, logistics, procurement, and related networks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the package as part of an effort to sever Iran’s remaining economic lifelines after months of military pressure failed to resolve cow Tehran. Beijing responded within hours. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian denounced the measures as “illicit” unilateral sanctions with “no basis in international law,” warned that they would heighten tensions and disrupt the global economic order, and declared that China would “take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests.”

This deterioration in relations after Washington moved against Beijing is regrettable and unnecessary, though frankly not surprising. Indeed, even as the rhetoric of constructive engagement passed back and forth, it did not really prevent the machinery of economic coercion from grinding forward on both sides. Restrictions on advanced technology, drones, robotics, rare earths, and other strategic goods remained in place. Washington continued to add Chinese firms to various lists; Beijing answered with its own export controls, procurement bans, and countermeasure lists.

Unfortunately, the softer language of summit coexisted with the same assumption that has driven Washington’s policy toward Beijing for years: that American security requires constraining China’s economic rise wherever possible.

To be sure, China is an authoritarian state whose leadership’s interests often diverge from those of Washington’s. But that does not make every Chinese commercial success a national-security threat, nor does it prove Beijing seeks global domination. Much of its behavior is the pursuit of prosperity, security, and regional influence—goals Washington itself pursued for decades. And for its efforts at containment, Washington’s pressure has frequently produced the opposite of its intended effect: accelerated Chinese technological self-reliance, deeper ties with Russia and other non-aligned states, and a domestic narrative that the United States seeks to keep China poor and subordinate. The cycle is self-reinforcing. Washington reads Chinese pushback as hostility; Beijing reads American containment as confirmation that a multipolar world order is unacceptable.

Washington—or rather, Trump—should wake up.

Beijing holds real leverage that Washington cannot wish away. China’s dominant position in rare-earth processing, critical minerals, and key manufacturing nodes gives it tools that bite American industry and allies far more quickly than secondary sanctions on mid-tier trading firms bite China. Youth unemployment and a slowing domestic economy are genuine problems for Beijing, yet they do not translate into leverage for Trump. Beijing has repeatedly shown it can absorb economic pain and retaliate asymmetrically—export restrictions, procurement blacklists, regulatory harassment of U.S. firms—while framing the conflict as American overreach. Domestic difficulties have not forced Xi to accept Washington’s preferred terms; if anything, external pressure strengthens the Party’s narrative of resilience under siege.

The Iran campaign illustrates the danger most clearly. China remains the largest purchaser of Iranian oil. Pressuring Beijing to abandon those purchases, or expanding secondary sanctions from smaller intermediaries to major Chinese banks or refiners, will not produce a more compliant Tehran. It risks converting an already costly Middle East confrontation into a fresh source of bilateral friction at the precise moment when both sides claim to seek stability and an end to conflict. One plausible side-effect is already visible in the diplomatic calendar: the September 24 White House visit, intended as the reciprocal high point after Trump’s Beijing trip, now hangs under a cloud. Beijing has every incentive to signal displeasure by postponing, narrowing, or canceling Xi’s travel if it concludes that Washington is simply exporting its Iran policy into the China relationship. Even if the meeting proceeds, the atmosphere will be colder and the deliverables thinner.

Great-power diplomacy does not require resolving every disagreement. It does require the ability to compartmentalize them. Washington’s simultaneous economic campaigns against Iran and against Chinese commercial actors make compartmentalization harder, not easier. The result is less strategic stability and more tit-for-tat escalation that neither side fully controls or wants.

None of this requires naïveté about the Chinese Communist Party. It requires recognizing that Washington cannot micromanage the energy purchases, technology policies, and commercial choices of a peer competitor halfway around the world without inviting reciprocal coercion. China is not disappearing. Relative power continues to shift in a multipolar direction. Washington’s post-unipolar habits of militarized economic pressure and maximalist demands are poorly suited to this reality.

A more stable relationship would begin with accepting that China will not be defeated or subordinated on American terms, and that peaceful coexistence, mutually beneficial commerce, and a narrower definition of vital interests are the realistic alternatives to perpetual friction. The late-August sanctions round and Beijing’s swift vow of retaliation suggest that path is narrowing, not widening. Whether the September summit survives intact—or becomes a casualty of Washington’s merging of its Iran war and China policy—will say more about the future of the relationship than any communiqué.