The Council for the National Interest (CNI) is an anti-Israel organization which is opposed to U.S. aid to Israel and disseminates demonizing propaganda about Israel to academics, politicians, and other audiences.

On June 10, 2007, CNI published an ad in The New York Times in support of an anti-Israel rally held that same day in Washington D.C.  The ad demanded: "End the Israeli occupation now!" calling for Israel to "get out of the West Bank and Golan Heights, and free up Gaza." The ad also included a cartoon that CNI described, in a letter to supporters prior to the ad's release, as depicting "the top six presidential contenders scrambling to get to an AIPAC podium to express their 'undying support' to the state of Israel." A caption in the cartoon said: "They're competing for the president of which country?"   

CNI has run inflammatory anti-Israel ads in major national newspapers since 2002. In a previous ad in The New York Times, published April 22, 2007, CNI condemned Israel, calling on Congress to "deal with Israeli apartheid in Palestine!" This ad further condemned U.S. support for what it claimed were "Israel's policies of colonization, Apartheid and imprisonment of the Palestinians," which, according to the ad, were "making the two-state solution to the conflict impossible." The ad avoided any condemnation of terrorism. Rather, it called for an overhaul of U.S. policy in the Middle East, including financing the Hamas-led Palestinian government and starting a dialogue with Syria and Iran.

Prior to that, in an ad that it published in The New York Times on November 5, 2006, CNI blamed Israel for the war in Iraq and accused the "Israel Lobby" of trying to of push the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran. The ad included a cartoon in which the "Israel Lobby" is depicted as a crooked used cars salesman and the U.S. as its gullible customer.

Other previous CNI ads have described Israel's founding in 1948 as a time when Israel "rejected, uprooted, tortured, maimed and expelled" the Palestinian population; have described Israel as a state that promotes "discrimination and apartheid"; and have called for Israel to be "held accountable" for "espionage and covert operations against the U.S.," and for its "development of weapons of mass destruction."  CNI also claimed that Israel is responsible for "metastasiz[ing] terror around the world," and for "acts of aggression, provocation, and massive retaliation" against neighboring Arab states.

Moreover, CNI is becoming increasingly more involved in an old anti-Israel campaign that is rooted in the discredited accusation that during Israel's Six Day War in 1967, Israeli forces purposely attacked an American ship, the USS Liberty, and that because of a conspiracy to cover up the truth by U.S. officials, Israel was never held accountable. In June 2007, CNI Foundation hosted an event to commemorate the attack.

Also, in April 2007, James Abourezk, a former U.S. Senator and the CNI Foundation vice chairman, published two articles in The Liberty News, a newsletter of the USS Liberty Veterans Association, that attacked Israel as illegitimate and Zionism as racism. In one article, Abourezk claimed that Israel's war of independence was part of a Zionist "ethnic cleansing" campaign and that the Palestinians "wanted no part in the violence being introduced into their homeland by the Jewish military." He also wrote that the Holocaust "became a bonanza for the Zionist movement" and claimed that the vote in the UN in favor of establishing a Jewish state was an "injustice" and, from a legal perspective, should not be seen as binding. Abourezk quoted a Jewish friend, whose name he withheld: "Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, but it has everything to do with fascism." In a second article, Abourezk praised the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Asad and claimed that "the Israeli Lobby" was pushing for a war against Iran.

In contrast to its harsh criticism of Israel, CNI has defended terror groups that attack Israel, particularly Hamas. In a December 2006 solicitation letter, CNI stated that "despite Congress's repeated attempts to characterize Hamas as an anti-Christian terrorist organization, the fact is that Hamas has just announced that they will give [money] for Bethlehem's Christmas celebration." The letter had followed similar statements in support of the Palestinian terror organization and several meetings in the Middle East earlier in 2006 between CNI representatives and key leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, including Khaled Mishal and Hassan Nasrallah, as well as Syrian president Bashar Assad.

In a widely circulated 2003 article, "Liberating America from Israel," CNI founding chairman Paul Findley, a member of CNI's board of directors, blamed America's relationship with Israel for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  "Nine-eleven would not have occurred," Findley wrote, "if the U.S. government had refused to help Israel humiliate and destroy Palestinian society."  He continued, "America suffered 9/11 and its aftermath and may soon be at war with Iraq, mainly because U.S. policy in the Middle East is made in Israel, not in Washington."

In May 2000, Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey, CNI's chairman, spoke at the conference of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a Holocaust denial organization. He shared the stage with known anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers like David Irving, Mark Weber, Robert Faurisson, Arthur Butz, John Bennett and Ernst Zundel. From the podium, McCloskey said of the IHR, "I respect the thesis of this organization."

CNI was founded in 1989 by several former U.S. government officials, including Paul Findley and McCloskey (both former U.S. congressmen), Andrew Killgore (former U.S. ambassador to Qatar), Eugene H. Bird (formerly with the U.S. foreign service) and Richard Curtiss (former U.S. Information Agency chief).  CNI is an offshoot of the Washington D.C.-based American Educational Trust (AET), an anti-Israel group that publishes Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.