How Barack Obama learned to love Israel

His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy. Money and votes, but especially money, channelled through sophisticated and coordinated networks that can "bundle" small donations into million dollar chunks are what buy influence on policy. Currently, advocates of Palestinian rights are very far from having such networks at their disposal. Unless they go out and do the hard work to build them, or to support meaningful campaign finance reform, whispering in the ears of politicians will have little impact.

Ali Abunimah from Electronic Intifada

Comments

[Sunny]

Anyone who doesn't already know about the covert nature of any lobbying process should not really be in the business. So this is nothing new.

This also confirms why groups such as MPAC will never have any meaningful impact.

[david goldman]

The author here falls into the common trap also applicable to discourse on the Israel lobby. He needs to establish that the support for Israel is not genuine. Maybe X person's support for Israel has to do with their beliefs and not some ulterior motive. Maybe it is a combination of both. I can write an article about how Ali Abunimah fell in love with Palestine. There is a confusion between correlation and causation.