The Invisible Donation, Israel’s Diaspora Bond
In the early 1990s Benedict Anderson proposed a concept, long-distance nationalism. The politics of communities who stay attached to a territory they’ve never lived in, simply because they see it as their ancestral home. For Anderson this attachment wasn’t abstract, it turned into real political power once capitalism made mass migration and mass communication possible, taking the form of votes, lobbying, donations, sometimes far more radical forms. Alain Dieckhoff of Sciences Po tested this hypothesis directly on the American Jewish diaspora in 2017, studying the tie to Israel held by a community of 5.2 million people, seventy percent of the global Jewish diaspora. His question was whether a nationalism built at a distance actually exists, and if so, what political shape it takes.
AIPAC is the institutional answer to that question. For more than sixty years the organisation has functioned as an apparatus converting this long-distance attachment into spendable political capital in Washington. But that conversion has a condition of its own, one Bourdieu’s theory of capital makes clear, symbolic capital only works as long as those who carry it refuse to see its true nature. The mechanism runs as long as the donor doesn’t experience their donation as a calculated interest, as long as the voter doesn’t experience their vote as an exchange. AIPAC’s founding in 1954 solved that condition through a name from the very start. That year the organisation was established as the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, as a line of defence against the international backlash that followed a raid on the village of Qibya, in which 69 Palestinians died and which was condemned at the time by the US State Department and the UN Security Council. In 1959 the name changed, “Zionist” dropped for “Israel,” specifically to open the group to American Jews who didn’t identify as Zionists. This was a way of institutionalising Anderson’s concept, presenting a narrow movement’s long-distance attachment as though it were a universal American interest.
Seventy years later the same organisation is trying to solve that same condition again, not through a name this time but through concealment. In the Illinois primaries it spent $1.3 million not under its own name but through anonymous committees like Affordable Chicago Now, without disclosing the source until after the election. An affiliated super PAC funded two anonymous groups in the same state that spent more than $14 million. This tactic isn’t unique to AIPAC, it’s a practice that has spread across every corner of American electoral politics since Citizens United, crypto and AI industry super PACs use it, so do Democratic and Republican dark money groups alike. But the same tactic means something different for different groups. Others use it to build power. AIPAC is using it to hide a unanimity it’s already losing. What happened in 1959 was a renaming, open and permanent, a solution that never had to be revisited. What’s happening now is a hiding that has to be rebuilt every single cycle. An institution is strong if it can name itself once and keep that protection forever. If it has to invent a new hiding place every election, that means the source of its power is already running dry.
What’s drying up is the very kind of distant attachment Anderson described. This isn’t an abstract claim, it’s a measurable trend. In interviews with 1,022 Jewish adults, support for Israel is becoming a lower priority for younger American Jews, and this split is especially pronounced among those who identify as religiously Jewish. Cameron Bernstein, a twenty-seven-year-old medical student in New Orleans, sums up this trend in a single sentence, she prays for the people on that land but doesn’t need to pray for the state. This is the reverse of what Anderson called attachment to the nation at a distance, the distance hasn’t closed, but the attachment no longer arrives as automatically as it used to. Sixty-four percent of American Jews still hold a positive view of Israel, but 56 percent have little or no confidence in how Netanyahu is handling world affairs. This divide isn’t new. In 2018, right after the embassy moved to Jerusalem, a survey found 77 percent of Israeli Jews approved of Trump’s handling of the relationship, while only 34 percent of American Jews did. That gap had been sitting there for eight years, carrying no political cost, because the front of unanimity built in 1959 was enough to keep it invisible. It isn’t enough anymore, because the front itself has become the story.
An important distinction is worth making here, because this piece is about AIPAC, not about the American Jewish community itself. Anderson’s concept describes a people’s emotional history. AIPAC is a single institution that converts that history into political capital, and conflating the two is both inaccurate and dangerous. Some of AIPAC’s sharpest critics are American Jews themselves, a statement published in The Nation, signed by numerous American Jews, describes the organisation’s electoral interventions as “unprecedented and damaging.” J Street, which also describes itself as pro-Israel while criticising AIPAC’s tactics, made exactly this distinction in a statement last month, writing that criticism of AIPAC isn’t inherently antisemitic, but that a dangerous line gets crossed when criticism shifts from an organisation’s ideas to a broader suspicion cast on Jews themselves. This piece doesn’t take a side in the controversy that broke out in June over Mayor Mamdani’s criticism of AIPAC, but it wants to be clear about one thing, analysing an institution’s strategy isn’t a claim about a people.
The concrete result of this distinction shows up in a shift of targets. In 2024, AIPAC openly targeted and defeated two Squad members who had criticised the Gaza war, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, celebrating it on its own account with the words “The Many have spoken.” That was a show of strength. Two years later, when $2.2 million was spent against former Congressman Tom Malinowski in February, that same confidence was gone, because Malinowski wasn’t a progressive, just a moderate who gently questioned Washington’s military support for Israel. When a pressure mechanism starts looking for its enemy inside its own ranks instead of outside them, it has stopped defending and started panicking. In Maryland’s fifth district primary, one candidate said it outright, opposition to the Iran war had become inseparable from opposition to AIPAC itself. In 1954 the organisation was built against condemnation from outside. Today it’s being rebuilt against the smallest hesitation from within.
Bourdieu’s concept of misrecognition, méconnaissance, explains the mechanics of this collapse. A form of capital only works as long as those who carry it refuse to see its true nature. AIPAC’s sixty-year success came from making Anderson’s long-distance attachment feel like a spontaneous American value rather than a calculated loyalty. That illusion is dissolving now, precisely because of the anonymous committees, because knowing there’s a calculation hidden behind a donation makes that misrecognition impossible. Once an institution loses the misrecognition built around it, all that’s left is the naked calculation, and naked calculation convinces no one.
Coming back to Bernstein’s sentence, what actually breaks there isn’t a political position. She still prays for the people on that land. What breaks is that automatic bond itself, the silent identification with the state that used to be given without question. AIPAC’s seventy years of power were built exactly on that automatic bond. Once that bond becomes something people have to question, all that’s left in the organisation’s hands is an increasingly expensive way of hiding the fact that it’s being questioned. Israel’s problem with Washington was not being at the table. Its problem with the diaspora runs deeper, the long-distance attachment feeding that table is coming undone, as quietly as Bernstein’s own voice.
