Nobody gets accused of privateering. Nobody gets expelled. The tools changed; the underlying function, mobilizing domestic resources on behalf of a foreign government’s preferred policy outcome, did not.
The Investigation Nobody Remembers
In 1962, Senator J. William Fulbright, a man with an evidently low tolerance for foreign money sloshing around Capitol Hill, opened a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation into covert influence operations inside the United States.
What he found was that the American Zionist Council (AZC) was receiving substantial funding from the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental Jerusalem body, to run public relations campaigns and lobby American politicians. In 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department did what the law technically required: it ordered the AZC to register as a foreign agent under FARA.
Registration would have been a death sentence. Every pamphlet, every press release, every friendly lunch with a congressman would have had to be stamped, essentially, “paid foreign propaganda,” an unforgivable branding problem for any advocacy operation that needs Americans to believe it speaks with an authentically American voice.
So, the AZC’s leadership did something rather elegant: they shut the lobbying arm down and reconstituted it as a new, smaller, entirely domestic-facing organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC took American donations from American citizens, which meant that, on paper, no foreign government was funding a single thing it did. That its explicit mission was to advance the policy preferences of a foreign government was, apparently, beside the legal point. The Justice Department dropped its case. A blueprint was born, and it has been photocopied by half of Washington’s advocacy industry ever since.
It is worth pausing to admire the craftsmanship here because Genêt never had access to this kind of legal choreography. He tried to arm privateers directly. AIPAC’s founders realized you don’t need privateers if you can simply fund a Political Action Committee.
Whereas the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s organised rallies and pamphleteering campaigns to win popular sympathy for France, today’s pro-Israel PACs and Super PACs (including AIPAC’s own United Democracy Project) raise hundreds of millions from American donors and spend that money against any congressional candidate insufficiently enthusiastic about unconditional military aid.
Nobody gets accused of privateering. Nobody gets expelled. The tools changed; the underlying function, mobilizing domestic resources on behalf of a foreign government’s preferred policy outcome, did not.
Bypassing the President, Politely
Genêt’s second cardinal sin was trying to go over Washington’s head directly to the American public and Congress, hoping popular enthusiasm would force the executive branch’s hand.
In March 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did something structurally identical and considerably more polished: at the invitation of congressional Republicans, and without so much as a courtesy call to the Obama White House, he addressed a joint session of Congress to lobby American lawmakers directly against the administration’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal.
Where Genêt tried to rally the street, Netanyahu simply rented the House chamber. Both maneuvers rested on the same calculation: that a foreign leader could use American domestic institutions to outflank an American president who happened to disagree with him. Genêt got expelled for the attempt. Netanyahu got a standing ovation. Progress, of a sort.
The Genêt Precedent Weaponized Against Its Own Author
There is a darker echo buried in the story, one the document underlying this piece traces with some precision. The Neutrality Act of 1794, passed specifically to stop Genêt from smuggling privateers and armaments out of American ports on France’s behalf, became, a century and a half later, the exact statute used to prosecute an entirely different clandestine arms network: the one built in the late 1940s to smuggle weapons to the nascent state of Israel in defiance of the US arms embargo.
Through what came to be called the Sonneborn Institute, American Zionists purchased surplus WWII bombers and munitions through front companies, filed false flight plans, painted over military markings, and routed the shipments through third countries. The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, prosecuted the operators under the very law Genêt’s recklessness had produced. History does love a closed loop.
What happened next diverges sharply from Genêt’s fate, and the divergence is the whole point. Genêt was permanently exiled from diplomatic relevance. The American operatives convicted of Neutrality Act violations in the Israeli smuggling case were, decades later, quietly pardoned by Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, as Israel’s status shifted from embarrassing legal liability to indispensable Cold War asset. The law didn’t change. The politics around whom it was convenient to punish did.
The Alliance’s Darkest Stress Test
If Washington’s Farewell Address warning against “passionate attachments” to foreign nations was ever tested to the point of destruction, it was on June 8, 1967, when Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American intelligence ship, in international waters, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171. Israel said it was a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Surviving crew members, including Captain William McGonagle, insisted the ship was flying a huge American flag in broad daylight, and had been watched for hours by Israeli reconnaissance planes. The Johnson administration publicly bought the accident story, ordered a secret investigation, and warned survivors never to speak of the incident again on pain of court-martial.
Whatever actually happened off the Sinai coast that afternoon, what happened afterward in Washington was unambiguous: the strategic relationship took priority over a full accounting of thirty-four American deaths. Washington’s ghost, wherever it resides, presumably did not find this reassuring.
Six years later, the pattern repeated on a civilizational scale. When Egypt and Syria launched their surprise 1973 Yom Kippur War offensive, Richard Nixon authorized Operation Nickel Grass, airlifting 22,000 tons of tanks, artillery, and ammunition to Israel, a decision that pushed American nuclear forces to DEFCON 3 as the Soviet Union threatened its own intervention, and that triggered an Arab oil embargo that quadrupled American gas prices and helped detonate a decade of stagflation.
It is difficult to imagine a more literal illustration of Washington’s warning that a passionate attachment to a foreign nation would force ordinary Americans to bear the domestic cost of someone else’s war.
The Argument Nobody Can Finish
All of this feeds the modern debate over “dual loyalty,” arguably the single most radioactive phrase in American political discourse, and the direct descendant of the insults Hamilton and Jefferson traded when each accused the other of secretly serving a foreign master.
Critics argue that congressional pledges of unconditional support, uncontested military aid votes, and state-level anti-boycott laws reveal a foreign policy captured by lobbying pressure. Defenders counter, not unreasonably, that “dual loyalty” accusations carry the unmistakable residue of older antisemitic conspiracy theories about hidden Jewish control and that American support for Israel reflects a genuine, freely chosen judgment about shared democratic values and regional stability rather than coercion.
Both things can be true in part; neither side has managed to convince the other of anything in over half a century of trying, which is itself a kind of answer.
Same Question, Better Tailoring
Genêt’s failure and AIPAC’s success are not really different stories. They are the same story told with radically different levels of institutional sophistication. Genêt tried to bypass the American government by force of enthusiasm and got expelled within a year.
Modern foreign-aligned lobbying operates, patiently and legally, inside the very campaign finance and electoral machinery the Founders built to protect American sovereignty from people exactly like Genêt, using PACs instead of privateers, congressional addresses instead of street rallies, and donor networks instead of front companies smuggling bombers through Czechoslovakia.
George Washington, watching all this from whatever vantage point the dead are afforded, warned in 1796 that passionate attachment to a foreign power would eventually turn loyal American citizens into “instruments of foreign ambition,” shielding that foreign power from the scrutiny it would otherwise receive. He believed the republic could not remain sovereign if its own domestic political machinery ended up serving someone else’s capital.
Two and a half centuries later, America has not resolved that tension so much as it has learned to live with it comfortably, fund it generously, and argue about it forever.
Citizen Genêt would no doubt be impressed, mostly by how much easier it all became once nobody had to admit, out loud, that they were doing exactly what he tried to do first, albeit with different results… so far.
These last two words are dedicated to American citizens.
No further explanation needed!
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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