It’s very different.

I was adjacent to state level politics for a long time. The German, Korean and French economic development organizations would come around every now and again with promotional events coordinated with their embassy to promote partnerships and business opportunities. Sometimes they had lobbyists focused on general relationship building, more often for specific issues.

The Israeli ground game is different. American PACs affiliated with or specifically “not affiliated with, but always talking about” Israeli interests show up at every level of government - a good friend is a town board member of a big suburban town and they call on him, and he refuses the contributions so will likely get primaried.

The real difference is information awareness. There is a CRM somewhere the ground guys have access to, and relationships are cultivated and used. My buddy is being targeted becuase there’s a good chance he’ll be in the state legislature someday. There’s a pipeline to get targeted American politicians to tour Israel for whatever reason. When critical attention is focused on this stuff, the reaction is fast and painful for the media outlet or political actor.

The only thing close to this is China, who does similar stuff with a different playbook. They’ve been caught embedding agents of one sort or another in California and New York governments at a high level, as well as places like Florida or within government contractors with lower level people.

Note that we’ve purged the FBI counterintelligence division, so the brazenness of the “bad” stuff will get worse - nobody is watching.

That doesn't sound very different to me. It sounds like a competent ground operation; nothing you've described even approaches impropriety of the kind FARA is intended to our political system against.

(I also think this backfires spectacularly: there are now plenty of politicians running for office in the US on an explicitly "no AIPAC money received" line. That line clearly has pull with voters!)