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........

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