American support for Israel has run deep and largely unquestioned for decades, and this VPRO Backlight film starts from the moment two political scientists tried to question it. John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt's 2006 paper 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy' argued that AIPAC and its allies push Washington toward policies that serve Israel's interests over America's own, and the film interviews both the paper's defenders and its targets. Neocon Richard Perle and televangelist John Hagee argue for the alliance's importance; Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy describe how the lobby actually operates inside Congress and the White House. The film also tracks people who paid a price for dissent: Congressman Earl Hilliard, defeated after AIPAC-backed opposition, historian Tony Judt, whose lecture was cancelled after he criticized Israel's ethno-religious model, and Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth, targeted after condemning the Lebanon war. Investigative journalist Michael Massing rounds out the interviews. The film asks how far that influence reaches, and whether any politician can operate outside it.