The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has recently established its own political action committees. AIPAC is using tens of millions of dollars of PAC money to knock off candidates for office it believes won’t be sufficiently deferential to the government of Israel. There is a lot of current analysis about this in social and even legacy news media. Most of it has one thing in common: no history about how, when or why AIPAC came into existence. What exactly is AIPAC and where does it come from? Who founded AIPAC, and when? What did AIPAC’s founder do before creating a lobby for Israel in the U.S.? What happened when he ran into trouble with the Senate and Department of Justice? How does AIPAC history inform us about foreign influence on U.S. political campaigns and American Middle East policy today? Those are questions we answer in this thirteen-episode podcast.
