What Is the Israel Lobby and What Does it Do?

Presented on 10/10/23 by Dr. Walter L. Hixson, historian and commentator, and former distinguished professor, University of Akron. Dr. Hixson will provide an explanation of and historical analysis of the Israeli lobby in the US which he argues is the the largest, most well-funded and influential lobby acting on behalf of a foreign country in American history. His analysis stems from his work positing the connection of the two countries based on their characterization as “settler colonial nations“. This has created a special relationship between Israel and the US which has bolstered Israeli policies toward Palestinians. Dr. Hixson devoted four decades to academic life. He served as department chair at the University of Akron and as president of the American Association of University Professors chapter before retiring at the end of 2020. Since 2019 Hixson has been a columnist and contributing editor of the magazine, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Hixson received two Fulbright overseas teaching awards, most recently as distinguished chair at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing (2009). A generation earlier Hixson was the first Fulbright professor ever at Kazan State University in the former Soviet Union. Hixson wrote a memoir on the memorable experience, Witness to Disintegration: Provincial Life in the Last Year of the USSR, published in 1993 by the University Press of New England. For the past decade Hixson has focused much of his attention on the Middle East and especially the issue of Israel-Palestine. In 2021, he published a comprehensive history of the role of the Israel lobby in the Palestine conflict. The book, Architects of Repression: How Israel and its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy was the follow-up to a previous study entitled Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2019). This research flowed from his previous examination of settler colonialism. Like Israel, the United States is a settler colonial nation, argued and analyzed by Hixson in American Settler Colonialism: A History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Hixson’s other works include The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and US Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2008), Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (St. Martin’s Press, 1997) and George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (Columbia University Press, 1989), co-winner of the Bernath Prize awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Hixson also published a textbook, American Foreign Relations: A New Diplomatic History (Routledge, 2016).