OZJF is an American advocacy organization. This section exists because foreign influence operations targeting United States institutions deserve public scrutiny, and because the American public conversation about foreign lobbying is unusually narrow. When most readers hear the phrase “Middle East lobby,” they think of a single country. The filings tell a broader story, and we think the broader story is worth reading in full.
We are not making accusations. We are reading the public record. The public record, in this case, comes from four main places: the Department of Justice’s FARA eFile database, the U.S. Department of Education’s Section 117 foreign gifts and contracts disclosures, the Government Accountability Office’s audit work on those disclosures (see GAO-24-106856), and the aggregated reporting curated by journalists and researchers at OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch. Readers who want the statutory framework explained in plain English should start with the Congressional Research Service’s legal overview of FARA. These are the same sources congressional staff, national-security reporters, and university compliance officers use. They are not partisan artifacts. They are filings.
Four Categories of Influence
Before any numbers, the categories have to be clear. First, direct FARA-registered lobbying captures foreign principals, meaning foreign governments, state-owned enterprises, state-owned media, and foreign political parties, paying U.S. firms or individuals to influence U.S. policy. Second, institutional funding captures contracts and gifts to U.S. universities, think tanks, museums, and civil-society organizations. For universities, this is disclosed under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. Third, state-owned media operations inside the United States are themselves FARA-registrable in most configurations. Fourth, and distinctly, domestic citizen lobbying by U.S. nationals and U.S.-funded organizations is regulated under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), not FARA. That fourth category is legally and morally different from the first three, and we treat it that way.
The Qatar-Versus-Israel Comparison
The single cleanest illustration of why this section exists is the contrast between Qatar and Israel. Using OZJF’s internal estimates synthesized from FARA filings and Section 117 disclosures, and described here as estimates rather than audited figures, Israel’s cumulative direct FARA-registered foreign-principal lobbying in the United States is on the order of $212 million. Qatar’s cumulative figure, combining FARA-registered direct lobbying and Section 117-disclosed higher-education gifts and contracts, is on the order of $6.86 billion. Qatar is a state of roughly three million people, established in 1971. Israel is a state of roughly ten million people, established in 1948. On a per-capita basis, the Qatar figure works out to roughly $2,280 per Qatari citizen. The Israeli figure works out to roughly $21 per Israeli citizen. Those are estimates. Each country page re-derives them from primary filings and shows its work.
We flag the per-capita comparison because the per-capita frame undoes a common rhetorical move. People sometimes argue that of course a small, contested state like Israel would lobby hard in Washington. Qatar is a much smaller state than Israel and is lobbying approximately a hundred times harder per citizen, and almost nobody is talking about it.
What We Are and Are Not Saying
We are not saying Qatari funding of American universities is proof of wrongdoing. Educational philanthropy by foreign states is legal, disclosed, and extremely common. We are saying that when a single foreign state becomes the largest Section-117-disclosed foreign source of gifts and contracts to U.S. higher education over the disclosure window, congressional oversight is appropriate, journalistic scrutiny is appropriate, and so is a public research page such as this one. The GAO has repeatedly found that the Department of Education’s monitoring of Section 117 disclosures has been uneven, as documented in GAO-24-106856. Readers can draw their own conclusions. We are showing the filings.
We are also not saying Israeli lobbying does not exist. It does. Israel’s page documents every FARA-registered Israeli principal we can identify. The U.S.-Israel relationship is a central American alliance, supported by OZJF on policy grounds, and that relationship includes public-diplomacy spending just like every other major alliance the United States maintains. Disclosure is disclosure. Israel’s FARA footprint is small relative to Qatar’s combined footprint, and that is a factual observation, not a normative one.
AIPAC Is Not On This List
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a U.S. citizen organization, funded by U.S. donors, registered under the LDA. It does not receive funding or direction from the Government of Israel. It is therefore not a FARA-registered foreign principal, and it is not in this section’s leaderboard. We explain the legal distinction and the history on the AIPAC page. Critics of AIPAC should critique it for what it actually is, a powerful American citizen lobby, not for something it is not.
Country Pages
The section’s country-specific pages are organized alphabetically. Start with Qatar for the largest combined footprint, and Israel for the state whose lobbying is most often discussed. The Congressional Research Service’s country-specific reports, including CRS R44533 on Qatar and CRS RL33476 on Israel, are useful companion reading. Additional country pages will follow, covering Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Egypt, and Iran, each built from the same four-category framework.
Methodology and Corrections
Every number on every page in this section has a last-verified date, a link to a primary filing, and a methodology note describing what the number includes and excludes. We invite corrections. If we have a number wrong, we want to fix it. The corrections page explains how to submit one. We would rather be corrected than confident.
We are just asking questions. The questions are, who is paying whom, for what, and what does the public record actually say. The answers are in the filings.