(LifeSiteNews) — The “incredibly powerful interest group” referred to as the Israel Lobby basically controls American policy makers to the extent that the U.S. government will regularly act against its own interests and those of its people, even to a radical strategic and moral degree, in favor of the interests of Israel, Dr. John Mearsheimer explained to Tucker Carlson in an interview released Wednesday.
Appearing often in alternative media, Mearsheimer is perhaps best known for co-authoring an impactful academic paper that turned into a New York Times best-seller titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007). The professors argued that the highly effective efforts of “a loose coalition of pro-Israel individuals and organizations” was a driving force for American foreign policy adopting “decades of unconditional U.S. support for Israel” as its centerpiece with detrimental effects to the authentic interests of both nations.
Citing one example of such unconditional support, Mearsheimer referenced how every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, with the exception of Donald Trump, has “pushed hard” for a two-state solution in the Middle East but have been rebuffed by the Israelis at every turn.
READ: Did the Israeli government help fund Hamas to undermine a two-state solution?
“The United States has a vested interest in having peace in the Middle East. It’s not in our interest to have wars in that region” lest the U.S. is forced to commit troops and fight wars, explained the distinguished political science professor at the University of Chicago.
“And this is just a strategic dimension. We’re not even talking about the moral dimension,” he said. “I mean, the Israelis are executing a genocide in Gaza and we are complicit in that genocide.”
Then looking at the definition of genocide from the Genocide Convention of 1948, of which Israel is a signatory, he said, “what’s happening here is that the Israelis are systematically trying to destroy the Palestinians as a national group. They’re targeting them as Palestinians and they’re trying to destroy Palestinian national identity in addition to murdering huge numbers of Palestinians.”
Early Zionist leaders ‘understood that they were going to have to do horrible things to the Palestinians’
Asked by Carlson what the goal of all of this was, the international relations scholar, who belongs to the “realist” school of thought, explained “the Israelis have long been interested in expelling the Palestinian population from greater Israel.”
READ: Expelling the Palestinian people has always been a goal of Zionism
This goes back to the founding literature of the Zionists like David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, Mearsheimer continued. “Ethnic cleansing was a subject that the Zionists talked about from the get-go and they talked about it extensively because there was no way they could create a greater Israel without doing massive ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian people who had been in this land of their forefathers for many centuries.
Early Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky “understood that they were going to have to do horrible things to the Palestinians,” and they were “explicit in saying that they did not blame the Palestinians one second for resisting what the Jews from Europe were going to do to them. They fully understood that they were stealing their land. And they fully understood that it made perfect sense for the Palestinians to resist, which of course they did.”
‘This is the third attempt at a massive ethnic cleansing in Gaza’
The Zionists went on to execute massive and bloody ethnic cleansing campaigns in 1948 and 1967, the best-selling author described. “So October 7th happens and what the Israelis see is an excellent opportunity for ethnic cleansing. And they make this clear. In other words, it’s an excellent opportunity to go to war in Gaza and drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and solve that demographic problem that they face.”
“And the way to do it is to turn the IDF, the Israeli military, loose and let them tear the place apart,” he observed. “So this is the third attempt at a massive ethnic cleansing in Gaza.”
READ: Former Israeli defense minister affirms IDF is committing ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza
The political science professor described how Israel is executing Ben-Gurion’s written plan to expand the borders into Lebanon and Syria as well and may perhaps look to the Sinai Peninsula in the future too.
They have a second goal for the region too which includes ensuring “their neighbors are weak, and that means breaking them apart if you can, and keeping them broken.”
Thus, with the help of the U.S. and Turkey Israel has been successful at breaking apart Syria and looks to accomplish the same outcome in Iran. Furthermore, Jordan and Egypt are controlled by the financial leverage the U.S. holds over them due to enormous levels of foreign aid, “so Jordan and Egypt never cause the Israelis any problem,” Mearsheimer explained.
Israel Lobby ‘incredibly powerful.’ ‘There’s no president who is willing to buck the lobby’
Carlson, who as a Fox News host built the highest-rated cable news show in history before being suddenly ousted in April 2023 amid concerns he had a “lack of enthusiasm for the Jewish state,” reflected “it sounds like our entire foreign policy, at least in the Western Hemisphere, is based on this one country.”
He went on to ask why this is the case, to which Mearsheimer responded, “there’s one simple answer: the Israel lobby. I think the lobby is an incredibly powerful interest group,” he said. “It has awesome power and it basically is in a position where it can profoundly influence US foreign policy.”
Illustrating the level of control exercised by this foreign lobby over the American people’s elected representatives, the political scientist said, “there’s no president who is willing to buck the lobby.”
READ: Understanding how the Zionist lobby continues to shape US foreign policy
Carlson: ‘People just have no idea what the facts are’
Besides the policy aims of the lobby over the years, the Lobby has also been very successful at influencing the public discourse, Mearsheimer explained.
In fact, Carlson reflected, they have been “so successful that just basic historical facts about the creation of this nation state in 1948 are like unknown to people and it’s shocking to hear them. And you think ‘well that can’t be right, that’s like so far from what I heard as a child’ … I mean people just have no idea what the facts are.”
“The lobby went to great lengths to make sure that you didn’t know the facts,” Mearsheimer responded.
WATCH: The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States
“And anyone who said the facts out loud was like a lunatic or a jihadist or a hater of some kind,” Carlson recalled. Or “an anti-Semite, self-hating Jews,” replied the professor, finishing his thought.
Sinful tactic of calumny: ‘They’re the most vicious people I’ve ever dealt with, ever’
Discussing this common tactic of using the vicious sin of such public calumnies to intimidate and silence critics of Israel’s crimes, Carlson recalled, “everyone was afraid to talk about any of this to the extent that people understood it because they don’t want to be called names and because those names are (horrible).”
In considering the aggressiveness of the Zionists lobby to shut down free speech, the former FoxNews host said, “they’re the most vicious people I’ve ever dealt with, ever,” to which Mearsheimer agreed.
READ: How the ‘antisemitism industry’ became the biggest threat to freedom in the West
Israel Lobby ‘has lost control of the discourse’ and public opinion moving against them
Yet, in the 18 years since the release of his co-authored book on the Lobby, the professor observed that such tactics are no longer so effective because “the lobby has lost control of the discourse and people now understand that the United States is doing things for Israel that are not in the American national interest.”
“Furthermore, they see the lobby out in the open, engaging in smash mouth politics. People are now fully aware that there is a lobby out there and that it’s trying to control the discourse,” he said.
The advent of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s fundamentally impacted Israel’s effectiveness in this regard, because with these new means of communication, the mainstream media is no longer “the sole source of information on these issues. The story about the real creation of Israel and what Israel is doing today is (now) available to the vast majority (of people).”
Yet even though the Lobby still demonstrably “controls the policy makers,” Carlson observed that “public opinion is moving so radically in the other direction.”
In fact, a recent Gallup poll found that only 32% of Americans approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza, with 60 percent expressing disapproval.
READ: Only 32% of Americans approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza: Gallup poll
Lobby moves to censor the internet, campus demonstrations
Such a divergence “is not sustainable,” Carlson observed. “You can’t have, in a democracy, policy that’s 180 degrees from public opinion over time. That just doesn’t work. So you have to either change the policy or change public opinion.”
“And no one’s even making any attempt at all to change public opinion through good faith argument,” he continued. Therefore, “the only option is to stop the conversation” through censorship “if you want to maintain the status quo.”
“There’s no question that they’re trying to stop the conversation,” Mearsheimer replied. “They went to great lengths to shut down TikTok and the evidence is that the lobby played a key role.”
The main reason behind the United States’ push to ban social media application TikTok is due to Israel’s image rather than fears of Chinese infiltrations, congressional insiders have revealedhttps://t.co/Ybz3pg2ZYT
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) February 17, 2025
“Just banning one of the world’s biggest social media apps because it says things you don’t like,” Carlson mocked with a mild smirk.
“Yes, this is the way they’ve always behaved. The Lobby has always behaved this way,” the professor confirmed.
These attempts to stop this conversation have extended onto college campuses across the United States by radically misconstruing student demonstrators’ legitimate protests against the genocide in Gaza as instead being “all about antisemitism” Mearsheimer recalled.
And “many of the students who are out there protesting are Jewish. This cannot be emphasized enough. Many of them are Jewish and all of a sudden they’re turned into raving anti-Semites” by both the media and governmental authorities.
READ: Is the Trump admin weaponizing the justice system against critics of Israel?
“This is crazy,” Mearsheimer continued. “I talk to people on campuses” and everybody understands that these protests have “nothing to do with anti-Semitism.” Instead, suddenly, after October 7, it is discovered “that these campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism? This makes no sense at all.” Instead, they were “hotbeds of criticism of Israel and what it was doing to the Palestinians, but you can’t say that” since it is bringing attention to the genocide that’s taking place in Gaza. “That is unacceptable (to the Lobby).”
A documented genocide, conservative estimates of over 301,500 dead
As Israel continues to massacre and starve Palestinian civilians on a daily basis, reliable reports of Palestinian deaths number at least 60,332, including 17,400 children at a confirmed minimum with at least 147,643 people injured. These dead do not include around 14,000 who are missing and presumed dead and buried under the rubble.
Furthermore, at least 1,330 Palestinians have been killed and 8,818 injured attempting to access aid parcels from the widely condemned Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which started operating on May 26.
This system corrals the besieged and starving population into a small area where Israeli army commanders have often ordered their soldiers to fire on them, massacring many, and such killings continue today.
According to a rationale presented in a Lancet study in July 2024, one can conservatively estimate total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care to include 301,660 (132,730 children).
Zionists count on the public forgetting their crimes. ‘We’ll rewrite history’
In concluding his thoughts on these ongoing atrocities, Mearsheimer said “the Israelis are incredibly ruthless. There’s just no question about that. And they believe that Palestinians are subhumans: ‘two-legged animals,’ ‘grasshoppers,’ they use those kind of words.”
And as the documentation of this “livestream genocide” continues to accumulate, the Zionists are not too concerned about the outcome for their people and nation because they “basically calculate” that they can continue to do “horrible things” to the Palestinians, “and then with the passage of time people will forget. And not only will they forget, but ‘we’ll go to great lengths to help them forget. We’ll rewrite the history.’ That’s the idea.”
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