HOW INFLUENTIAL IS AIPAC? LESS THAN BEER SELLERS, PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS, AND TOYOTA [View all]

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s controversial comments, repeatedly suggesting that the relationship between the United States and Israel is fueled by vast sums of lobbying money, have been condemned by several of her fellow Democrats. Still, her allegations linger , with The New York Times publishing a story seriously examining Omar’s premise and wondering “Has Aipac—founded more than 50 years ago to ‘strengthen, protect and promote the U.S.-Israel relationship’—become too powerful?” In the online edition of the article, the question was positioned directly below an image of a pro-Israel activist in tefillin.

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For the period between 1998 and 2018, AIPAC didn’t make a dent in the Center for Responsive Politics’ list of the top-spending lobbying groups. The US Chamber of Commerce spent $1.5 billion during that span, with the National Association of Realtors coming in a distant second, at $534 million. In 2018, top spenders included Google parent company Alphabet, which spent $21.7 million in Washington, and Facebook, which shelled out over $12 million to lobbyists that year. The third-largest spender of 2018 was the Open Society Policy Center, a project of the notably Israel-critical billionaire George Soros, which ran up a $31.5 million tab in its attempts to influence the federal government. That nearly doubled the organization’s $16 million in spending in 2017, another year that AIPAC failed to crack the top 50, unlike such notorious civic menaces as American Amusements and AARP.

In 2018, total pro-Israel lobbying spending was around $5 million, of which AIPAC accounted for $3.5 million. In contrast, Native American casinos spent around $22 million that year. By Tablet’s count, AIPAC was the 147th highest-ranked entity in terms of lobbying spending in 2018. Their expenditures were about the same as International Paper, a company which is seldom tweet-stormed or even written about. The American Association of Airport Executives and Association of American Railroads outspent AIPAC by nearly a million dollars each—sensible, given the rivalry between the respective modes of transportation whose interests they represent. It’s $2 million behind both American Airlines and the Recording Industry Association of America, entities whose malign influence has gone regrettably underexamined over the years.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/281477/how-influential-is-aipac