Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy by Walter L. Hixson

Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy—offers a compelling history of the most powerful lobby acting on behalf of a foreign government in all of American history. 

The book puts to rest any doubt as to whether the Israel lobby has played and continues to play the crucial role in enabling aggression, the suppression of Palestinian rights, and the failure to achieve a comprehensive Middle East peace accord.

Rooted in archival evidence and an abundant secondary literature, Architects of Repression shows how AIPAC and other Israel affinity groups deploy propaganda, target campaign contributions, organize demonstrations, and exert political pressure to manage public opinion—and, especially, to influence the Congress. 

The massive foreign aid that the United States has provided Israel—far more than allocated to any other country and dispersed on favorable terms reserved for Israel alone--is only one of many enabling benefits the small Zionist state has received over many decades from the most powerful nation in the world.

For decades, as the book explains in depth, the Israel lobby has played the pivotal role as the United States enabled Israel’s disdain for a negotiated settlement of the Middle East conflict; its contemptuous dismissal of the plight of Palestinian refugees; its cultivation of nuclear weapons in defiance of the global nuclear non-proliferation movement; its profusion of palpably racist, illegal and destabilizing Jewish-only settlements; its takeover of Jerusalem, much of the West Bank, and the Golan Heights; and its ongoing violent aggression, which has victimized Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well as neighboring states notably Lebanon. In more recent years the Israel lobby launched a campaign to criminalize political engagement and freedom of speech by equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.  

The experts agree:

Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan says:

"The power of the Israel lobbies in American political life, widely acknowledged, has most often been discussed in a theoretical manner. The acclaimed Walter Hixson brings to the subject the clarity and careful documentation of the archival historian, and in so doing he sheds loads of illumination on lobbying that AIPAC officials themselves have admitted flourishes best in darkness."

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, is the former United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in the Occupied Territories and claims:

“A devastating, learned, brilliantly narrated study of how the extremities of US pro-Israeli policy came about and were maintained despite decades of severe Israeli crimes victimizing the Palestinian people as a whole in what had been their native country. Essential reading for anyone willing to expose themselves to inconvenient truths that definitively depict one of the darkest chapters in America’s foreign policy.”

Ilan Pappé, professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine states:

"If you ever wondered what the USA role in the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people is, you need to read this book. If you ever wondered how the Israeli lobby in the USA corrupted the American foreign policy towards Palestine and beyond, you need to read this book. This book analyses in a clear narration, based on solid analysis and documentation, how this corrupted and vicious American policy, culminated in the Trumpian era. This book points clearly to all the culprits who bred racism, violence and injustice in the USA and inflicted this unholy trinity on Palestine and its people."

Year: 2021

Paperback