This conflicts is nurturing the kind of Jewish and Palestinians we don't want to see. We don't want a generation full of people who are relentlessly justifying death and destruction on one hand, and hell bent on martyrdom on the other.
Those who have not grown out of the animal instincts of banging the other with their (God-given) horns, fangs and paws, rather than learning to use the tongue to resolve conflicts are called right wingers in my book. They don't want to see another point of view, and they have not developed the ability to see peaceful societies, they are too insecure to respect the others.
We need to have the vision to recognize the destructive leaders. I try to see the logic in the predictions of Henry Kissinger and Einstein that when Israel becomes the bully and brutally inhuman, its decline is imminent.
Netanyahu would be a classic subject of study, the man has no empathy and is devoid of common sense. Unless the people of Israel stop him, he is bent on destroying Israel, there is odd amount of sadism in him, that he enjoys killing people.
In a 1947 letter to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru intended to persuade India to support the establishment of a Jewish state, Einstein stated that the Balfour Declaration's proposal to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine "redresses the balance" of justice and history.[23]
writing....
Friends,
The brutal occupation
and the horrendous carnage in the Gaza Strip has taken enormous toll again and
again. It has sickened all thoughtful people. The more they know the more they
wonder why the US policy is so convoluted. Why the citizens in the land of the
free and the home of the brave, and their representatives in the congress are so
afraid to vote their conscience and stand for the principles we think we
cherish, but only delude ourselves.
Following article
from the current issue of the New Yorker (though long) is an essential reading
to really understand the subterranean workings of our congress.
We know,
unfortunately the congressmen have to sell their souls to remain in office. They
get acquainted with the truth only after leaving power of the office. The
question is who are they selling out to? The strangle hold of the AIPAC
(American Israeli Political Action Committee) is insidious and total. It has
succeeded because it is feared, the strong-arming of people in the public life
and academia, because of cultivated ignorance of the educated elite and the
apathy of our citizens. Contrary to the reality, we delude ourselves in
believing that we uphold peace and justice.
In desperation
Palestinian scholar Hanan Ashrawi asks, ”We are the only people on Earth asked
to guarantee the security of our occupier …while Israel is the only country that
calls for defense from its victims.”
As conscientious
people we need to analyze ask the hows and whys of our policies and their
enormous cost to the US in money material and the harvest of ill-will. This is a
very thoughtful and analytical article in helping us start this journey.
Mirza A. Beg
# # #
By Connie Bruck
Connie Bruck has
been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1989.
On July 23rd, officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—the powerful lobbying group known as AIPAC—gathered in a conference room at the Capitol for a closed meeting with a dozen Democratic senators. The agenda of the meeting, which was attended by other Jewish leaders as well, was the war in the Gaza Strip. In the century-long conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the previous two weeks had been particularly harrowing. In Israeli towns and cities, families heard sirens warning of incoming rockets and raced to shelters. In Gaza, there were scenes of utter devastation, with hundreds of Palestinian children dead from bombing and mortar fire. The Israeli government claimed that it had taken extraordinary measures to minimize civilian casualties, but the United Nations was launching an inquiry into possible war crimes.
Even before
the fighting escalated, the United States, Israel’s closest ally, had made
little secret of its frustration with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. “How will it have peace if it is unwilling to delineate a border, end
the occupation, and allow for Palestinian sovereignty, security, and dignity?”
Philip Gordon, the White House coördinator for the Middle East, said in early
July. “It cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely. Doing
so is not only wrong but a recipe for resentment and recurring instability.”
Although the Administration repeatedly reaffirmed its support for Israel, it was
clearly uncomfortable with the scale of Israel’s aggression. AIPAC did not share
this unease; it endorsed a Senate resolution in support of Israel’s “right to
defend its citizens,” which had seventy-nine co-sponsors and passed without a
word of dissent.
AIPAC is
prideful about its influence. Its promotional literature points out that a
reception during its annual policy conference, in Washington, “will be attended
by more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint
session of Congress or a State of the Union address.” A former AIPAC executive,
Steven Rosen, was fond of telling people that he could take out a napkin at any
Senate hangout and get signatures of support for one issue or another from
scores of senators. AIPAC has more than a hundred thousand members, a network of
seventeen regional offices, and a vast pool of donors. The lobby does not raise
funds directly. Its members do, and the amount of money they channel to
political candidates is difficult to track. But everybody in Congress recognizes
its influence in elections, and the effect is evident. In 2011, when the
Palestinians announced that they would petition the U.N. for statehood, AIPAC
helped persuade four hundred and forty-six members of Congress to co-sponsor
resolutions opposing the idea.
During the Gaza
conflict, AIPAC has made a priority of sending a message of bipartisan
congressional support for all of Israel’s actions. Pro-Israel resolutions passed
by unanimous consent carry weight, but not nearly so much as military funding.
During the fighting, Israel has relied on the Iron Dome system, a U.S.-funded
missile defense that has largely neutralized Hamas’s rockets. Although the U.S.
was scheduled to deliver $351 million for the system starting in October, AIPAC
wanted more money right away. On July 22nd, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had
sent a letter to Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, seeking an immediate
payment of $225 million.
In the
conference room, the senators sat on one side of a long table, the Jewish
leaders on the other. Robert Cohen, the president of AIPAC, justified Israel’s
assault, agreeing with Netanyahu that Hamas was ultimately responsible for the
deaths of its own citizens. At one point, Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia,
asked about conservative trends in Israel, a participant recalled. “He said that
he supports Israel, but he’s concerned that Israel is headed toward a one-state
solution—and that would be so damaging and dangerous for everyone
involved.”
Charles Schumer,
the senior Democrat from New York, interrupted. Turning to address the room, he
said, “It troubles me when I hear people equate Israel and Hamas. That’s wrong,
that’s terrible!” Kaine protested, “That’s not what I meant!” Cohen simply
repeated that Hamas was to blame for everything that was happening.
The Senate,
preparing for its August recess, hastened to vote on the Iron Dome funding. At
first, the appropriation was bundled into an emergency bill that also included
money to address the underage refugees flooding across the Mexican border. But,
with only a few days left before the break began, that bill got mired in a
partisan fight. Reid tried to package Iron Dome with money for fighting
wildfires, and then offered it by itself; both efforts failed, stopped largely
by budget hawks. “If you can’t get it done the night before recess, you bemoan
the fact that you couldn’t get it done, and everybody goes home,” a
congressional staffer said. Instead, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the
Republican leader, decided to stay over, even if it meant missing an event at
home. The next morning, with the halls of the Senate all but empty, an unusual
session was convened so that McConnell and Reid could try again to pass the
bill; Tim Kaine was also there, along with the Republicans John McCain and
Lindsey Graham. “There were five senators present and literally no one else!”
the staffer said. “They reintroduced it and passed it. This was one of the more
amazing feats, for AIPAC.”
In a press
conference, Graham, who has been a major recipient of campaign contributions
connected to AIPAC, pointed out that the funding for Iron Dome was intended as a
gesture of solidarity with Israel. “Not only are we going to give you more
missiles—we’re going to be a better friend,” Graham said. “We’re going to fight
for you in the international court of public opinion. We’re going to fight for
you in the United Nations.”
The influence of
AIPAC, like that of the lobbies for firearms, banking, defense, and energy
interests, has long been a feature of politics in Washington, particularly on
Capitol Hill. But that influence, like the community that AIPAC intends to
represent, is not static. For decades, AIPAC has thrived on bipartisanship,
exerting its influence on congressional Democrats and Republicans alike. But
Israel’s government, now dominated by a coalition of right-wing parties led by
Likud, has made compromise far less likely than it was a generation ago. Prime
Minister Netanyahu, the leader of Likud and an unabashed partisan of the
Republican view of the world, took office at about the same time as President
Obama, and the two have clashed frequently over the expansion of Israeli
settlements and the contours of a potential peace agreement between the Israelis
and the Palestinians. Although both men repeatedly speak of the unshakable bond
between the U.S. and Israel, their relationship has been fraught from the start.
In 2012, Netanyahu made little secret of the fact that he hoped Mitt Romney
would win the election. Time and again—over issues ranging from Iran to the
Palestinians—AIPAC has sided strongly with Netanyahu against Obama.
AIPAC’s spokesman, Marshall Wittmann, said that the lobby had no loyalty to any political party, in Israel or in the U.S., and that to suggest otherwise was a “malicious mischaracterization.” Instead, he said, “we are a bipartisan organization of Americans who exercise our constitutional right to lobby the government.” For AIPAC, whose stated mission is to improve relations between the U.S. and Israel, it is crucial to appeal across the political spectrum. In recent years, though, Israel has become an increasingly divisive issue among the American public. Support for Israel among Republicans is at seventy-three per cent, and at forty-four per cent among Democrats, according to a poll conducted in July by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press; the divide is even greater between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
This difference
represents a schism among American Jews—AIPAC’s vital core. For decades, the
Jewish community was generally united in its support for Israel. Today, a
growing number of American Jews, though still devoted to Israel, struggle with
the lack of progress toward peace with the Palestinians. Many feel that AIPAC
does not speak for them. The Pew Center’s survey found that only thirty-eight
per cent of American Jews believe that the Israeli government is sincerely
pursuing peace; forty-four per cent believe that the construction of new
settlements damages Israel’s national security. In a Gallup poll in late July,
only a quarter of Americans under the age of thirty thought that Israel’s
actions in Gaza were justified. As Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the executive director of
the left-leaning T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, told me, “Many
people I know in their twenties and thirties say, I have a perfectly good Jewish
life here—why do I need to worry about this country in the Middle East where
they’re not representing who I am as a Jew? I’m not proud of what’s happening
there. I’m certainly not going to send money. ”
This is
precisely the kind of ambivalence that AIPAC adherents describe as destructive.
And yet even Israeli politicians recognize that AIPAC faces a shifting landscape
of opinion. Shimon Peres, who served as Prime Minister and, most recently, as
President, says, “My impression is that AIPAC is weaker among the younger
people. It has a solid majority of people of a certain age, but it’s not the
same among younger people.”
For AIPAC, the
tension with the Obama Administration over Gaza comes amid a long series of
conflicts.
Perhaps the most significant of these is over the question of Iran’s
obtaining a nuclear weapon. Last October, Iran and the consortium of world
powers known as P5+1—Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United
States—met in Geneva to begin talks. For two decades, AIPAC has been warning
that if Iran acquired nuclear arms it would pose an existential threat to
Israel, which has had a nuclear capacity since the late sixties. Netanyahu has
insisted that the United States—or Israel alone, if necessary—must be prepared
to take military action against Iran. The Obama Administration, too, has said
that a nuclear Iran is unthinkable and that “all options”—including military
options—“are on the table.” But Netanyahu fears that Obama is prepared to settle
for too little in the negotiations, and, when they began, he launched an
uninhibited campaign of public diplomacy against them. In early November, after
meeting in Jerusalem with Secretary of State John Kerry, he proclaimed a
tentative proposal “a very, very bad deal. It is the deal of the century for
Iran.” A photo op for the two men was abruptly cancelled, and Kerry returned to
Switzerland.
Later that
month, Ron Dermer, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., met with a bipartisan
group of two dozen congressmen in the offices of John Boehner, the House
Speaker. Dermer, who comes from a political family in Miami, worked in the
nineties for the Republican consultant Frank Luntz as he shaped Newt Gingrich’s
Contract with America campaign. A few years later, Dermer emigrated to Israel,
where he worked as a political consultant and wrote columns for the Jerusalem
Post, a conservative daily, in which he referred to Jews who denounced the
occupation as “self-haters.” When Netanyahu took office in 2009, he brought in
Dermer as a top adviser, and the two became virtually inseparable. “Whenever
we met with Bibi in the last several years, Dermer was there,” a former
congressional aide said. “He was like Bibi’s Mini-Me.” In Boehner’s offices, a
senior Democrat recalled, “Dermer was very critical of the proposed Iran nuclear
agreement. He talked about how Reagan would never have done anything like this.”
Finally, one of the other politicians in the room had to advise him, “Don’t talk
about what Reagan would do. He’s not very popular with Democrats.”
The great
incentive that the P5+1 could offer Iran was to reduce the sanctions that have
crippled its economy. As the talks proceeded, though, Israel’s supporters in
Congress were talking about legislation that would instead toughen the
sanctions. Dermer didn’t say specifically that he favored such a
law—representatives of foreign governments customarily do not advocate for
specific U.S. legislation—but it was clear that that was what he and the Israeli
leadership wanted. A former congressional staff member who attended the meeting
said, “The implicit critique was the naïveté of the President.”
Obama’s aides
were alarmed by the possibility that AIPAC might endorse new sanctions
legislation. They invited Howard Kohr, the group’s chief executive officer, and
officials from other prominent Jewish organizations to briefings at the White
House. Members of the Administration’s negotiating team, together with State
Department officials, walked them through the issues. “We said, ‘We know you
guys are going to take a tough line on these negotiations, but stay inside the
tent and work with us,’ ” a senior Administration official recalled. “We told
them directly that a sanctions bill would blow up the negotiations—the Iranians
would walk away from the table. They said, ‘This bill is to strengthen your hand
in diplomacy.’ We kept saying, ‘It doesn’t strengthen our hand in diplomacy. Why
do you know better than we do what strengthens our hand? Nobody involved in the
diplomacy thinks that. ’ ”
In late
November, the negotiators announced an interim Joint Plan of Action. For a
period of six months, Iran and the six world powers would work toward a
comprehensive solution; in the meantime, Iran would limit its nuclear energy
program in exchange for initial relief from sanctions. Netanyahu blasted the
agreement, calling it a “historic mistake,” and, within a few days, the
leadership of AIPAC committed itself to fighting for new sanctions. A senior
Democrat close to AIPAC described to me the intimate interplay between
Netanyahu’s circle and the lobby. “There are people in AIPAC who believe that
it should be an arm of the Likud, an arm of the Republican Party,” he said.
Wittmann, the lobby’s spokesman, disputed this, saying, “AIPAC does not take any
orders or direction from any foreign principal, in Israel or
elsewhere.”
For the Israeli
leadership and many of its advocates, the Iran negotiations presented an
especially vexing problem of political triangulation. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
Iran’s previous President, had been a kind of ideal adversary, attracting
widespread outrage by questioning whether the Holocaust had taken place and by
challenging Israel’s right to exist. Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli Ambassador
to the U.S., once described Ahmadinejad’s hateful rhetoric to me as “the gift
that keeps on giving.” But Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, was carefully
presenting himself as a relative moderate. Netanyahu would have none of it,
calling Rouhani “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“I come from a
hundred years in the future to warn you that nothing really changes in the next
hundred years.” AIPAC worked to mobilize its friends in Congress. Mark Kirk, a
Republican senator from Illinois and a major beneficiary of AIPAC-related
funding, began pressing to pass a new sanctions bill. “He was saying, ‘We’re in
negotiations with a wolf in sheep’s clothing!’ ” a former Senate aide recalled.
The bill, co-sponsored by Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was drafted
with considerable input from AIPAC. This was the first time in decades that the
lobby had challenged the sitting U.S. President so overtly.
The Obama
Administration was furious. “It’s one thing to disagree on some aspect of the
peace process, on things that are tough for Israel to do,” the senior
Administration official told me. “But this is American foreign policy that they
were seeking to essentially derail. There was no other logic to it than ending
the negotiations, and the gravity of that was shocking.”
AIPAC was
incorporated in 1963, fifteen years after the State of Israel came into being.
Its leader, Isaiah (Si) Kenen, had been a lobbyist for American Zionist
organizations and an employee of Israel’s Office of Information at the United
Nations. In that job, Kenen had been obligated to register under the Foreign
Agents Registration Act, which had stringent disclosure requirements about
financial expenditures and communications with the U.S. government. The
journalist M. J. Rosenberg, who volunteered at AIPAC in 1973 and is now a critic
of it, recalled Kenen’s saying that the foreign-agent model was too restrictive.
AIPAC would lobby Congress for aid to Israel, but its members would be
Americans, taking orders from an American board of directors. Rosenberg told me
that Kenen was “an old-fashioned liberal” who liked to say, “AIPAC has no
enemies, only friends and potential friends.” When asked which politicians he
hoped to elect, he said, “We play with the hand that is dealt us.” Congress must
lead, he said, and “our job is to help it lead.”
Kenen retired in
1974, and by the late eighties AIPAC’s board had come to be dominated by a group
of wealthy Jewish businessmen known as the Gang of Four: Mayer (Bubba) Mitchell,
Edward Levy, Jr., Robert Asher, and Larry Weinberg. Weinberg was a Democrat who
gradually moved to the right. The others were Republicans. In 1980, AIPAC hired
Thomas Dine, a former diplomat and congressional staffer, as its executive
director. Dine set out to develop a nationwide network that would enable AIPAC
to influence every member of Congress. This was a daunting challenge. Jews made
up less than three per cent of the American population, concentrated in nine
states, and they voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
How could AIPAC, with such
a small base, become a political force in both parties and in every
state?Dine launched a
grass-roots campaign, sending young staff members around the country to search
for Jews in states where there were few. In Lubbock, Texas, for instance, they
found nine who were willing to meet—a tiny group who cared deeply about Israel
but never thought that they could play a political role. The lobby created four
hundred and thirty-five “congressional caucuses,” groups of activists who would
meet with their member of Congress to talk about the pro-Israel
agenda.
Dine decided
that “if you wanted to have influence you had to be a fund-raiser.” Despite its
name, AIPAC is not a political-action committee, and therefore cannot contribute
to campaigns. But in the eighties, as campaign-finance laws changed and PACs
proliferated, AIPAC helped form pro-Israel PACs. By the end of the decade, there
were dozens. Most had generic-sounding names, like Heartland Political Action
Committee, and they formed a loose constellation around AIPAC. Though there was
no formal relationship, in many cases the leader was an AIPAC member, and as the
PACs raised funds they looked to the broader organization for
direction.
Members’
contributions were often bundled. “AIPAC will select some dentist in Boise, say,
to be the bundler,” a former longtime AIPAC member said. “They tell people in
New York and other cities to send their five-thousand-dollar checks to him. But
AIPAC has to teach people discipline—because all those people who are giving
five thousand dollars would ordinarily want recognition. The purpose is to make
the dentist into a big shot—he’s the one who has all this money to give to the
congressman’s campaign.” AIPAC representatives tried to match each member of
Congress with a contact who shared the congressman’s interests. If a member of
Congress rode a Harley-Davidson, AIPAC found a contact who did, too. The goal
was to develop people who could get a member of Congress on the phone at a
moment’s notice.
That persistence
and persuasion paid off. Howard Berman, a former congressman from California,
recalled that Bubba Mitchell became friends with Sonny Callahan, a
fellow-resident of Mobile, Alabama, when Callahan ran for Congress in 1984.
Eventually, Callahan became chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on
Foreign Operations. “Sonny had always been against foreign aid,” Berman said.
“Then he voted for it!”
Republicans knew
that they would never get more than a minority of the Jewish electorate, but
AIPAC members convinced them that voting the right way would lead to campaign
contributions. It was a winning argument. In 1984, Mitch McConnell narrowly beat
AIPAC supporters’ preferred candidate, the incumbent Democrat Walter Huddleston.
Afterward, McConnell met with two AIPAC officials and said to them, “Let me be
very clear. What do I need to do to make sure that the next time around I get
the community support?” AIPAC members let Republicans know that, if they
supported AIPAC positions, the lobby would view them as “friendly incumbents,”
and would not abandon them for a Democratic challenger. The Connecticut
Republican senator Lowell Weicker voted consistently with AIPAC; in 1988, he was
challenged by the Democrat Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew. Lieberman won, but
Weicker got the majority of funding from Jewish donors.
In the early
days, Howard Berman said, “AIPAC was knocking on an unlocked door.” Most
Americans have been favorably disposed toward Israel since its founding, and no
other lobby spoke for them on a national scale. Unlike other lobbies—such as the
N.R.A., which is opposed by various anti-gun groups—AIPAC did not face a
significant and well-funded countervailing force. It also had the resources to
finance an expensive and emotionally charged form of persuasion. Dine estimated
that in the eighties and nineties contributions from AIPAC members often
constituted roughly ten to fifteen per cent of a typical congressional campaign
budget. AIPAC provided lavish trips to Israel for legislators and other
opinion-makers.
Nevertheless,
the lobby did not endorse or rank candidates. “We made the decision to be one
step removed,” Dine said. “Orrin Hatch once said, ‘Dine, your genius is to play
an invisible bass drum, and the Jews hear it when you play it.’ ” In 1982,
after an Illinois congressman named Paul Findley described himself as “Yasir
Arafat’s best friend in Congress,” AIPAC members encouraged Dick Durbin, a
political unknown, to run against him. Robert Asher, a Chicago businessman, sent
out scores of letters to his friends, along with Durbin’s position paper on
Israel, asking them to send checks. Durbin won, and he is now the Senate
Majority Whip. (Findley later wrote a book that made extravagant claims about
the power of the Israel lobby.) In 1984, AIPAC affiliates decided that Senator
Charles Percy, an Illinois Republican, was unfriendly to Israel. In the next
election, Paul Simon, a liberal Democrat, won Percy’s seat. Dine said at the
time, “Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And
American politicians—those who hold public positions now, and those who
aspire—got the message.”
As AIPAC grew,
its leaders began to conceive of their mission as something more than winning
support and aid for Israel. The Gang of Four, a former AIPAC official noted,
“created an interesting mantra that they honestly believed: that, if AIPAC had
existed prior to the Second World War, America would have stopped Hitler. It’s a
great motivator, and a great fund-raiser—but I think it’s also AIPAC’s greatest
weakness. Because if you convince yourself that, if only you had been around,
six million Jews would not have been killed, then you sort of lose sight of the
fact that the U.S. has its own foreign policy, and, while it is extremely
friendly to Israel, it will only go so far.”
In the fall of
1991, President George H. W. Bush decided to delay ten billion dollars in loan
guarantees to Israel, largely because of the continuing expansion of
settlements. In response, AIPAC sent activists to Capitol Hill. The lobby was
confident. Its officials had told Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli Prime Minister at
the time, that Bush did not have the political desire to take on AIPAC,
according to a memoir by former Secretary of State James Baker. But Bush proved
willing to fight. The former AIPAC official recalled that Bubba Mitchell was
summoned to the White House for a meeting: “When he came back to the AIPAC
boardroom, an hour after the meeting, he was still shaking—because the President
of the United States yelled at him!” Soon afterward, Bush remarked that he was
“one lonely little guy” fighting “something like a thousand lobbyists.” The
Senate lined up behind him, and voted to postpone consideration of the loan
guarantees. For AIPAC, this marked the beginning of a difficult period. The
next June, Israeli voters ousted Shamir and his Likud Party and voted in Labor,
headed by Yitzhak Rabin. After a career of military campaigns and cautious
politics, Rabin began a transformation, offering to scale back settlement
activity. In response, Bush asked Congress to approve the loan guarantees.
Afterward, Rabin admonished the leaders of AIPAC, telling them that they had
done more harm than good by waging battles “that were lost in advance.” Daniel
Kurtzer, then the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs,
told me, “Rabin was furious with AIPAC. He felt they were allied with Likud and
would undermine him in what he was trying to do.”
In September,
1993, Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, which were aimed at building a
formal peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization. AIPAC
officially endorsed the agreement, and still does. But many members were
uncomfortable with it, according to Keith Weissman, a former analyst for the
lobby. “AIPAC couldn’t act like they were rejecting what the government of
Israel did, but the outcry in the organization about Oslo was so great that they
found ways to sabotage it,” he said. (In 2005, Weissman was indicted, along with
Steven Rosen, for conspiring to pass national-defense information to a reporter
and an Israeli government agent, and AIPAC fired them. The charges were
ultimately dropped.) As part of the agreement, the U.S. was to make funds
available to the Palestinians, Weissman said. “The Israelis wanted the money to
go to Arafat, for what they called ‘walking-around money.’ But AIPAC supported a
bill in Congress to make sure that the money was never given directly to Arafat
and his people, and to monitor closely what was done with it. And, because I
knew Arabic, they had me following all of Arafat’s speeches. Was he saying one
thing here, and another thing there? Our department became P.L.O.
compliance-watchers. The idea was to cripple Oslo.”
In 1995, AIPAC
encouraged Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, to support bipartisan
legislation to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This put Rabin
in a political corner. On one hand, he knew that such a move would infuriate the
Arab world and endanger the Oslo process. On the other, as Yossi Beilin, then an
official in the Labor government, pointed out, “You are the Prime Minister of
Israel and you are telling American Jews, ‘Don’t ask for recognition of
Jerusalem as our capital’? Nobody can do that!” At a dinner with AIPAC leaders,
Rabin told them that he did not support the bill; they continued to promote it
nonetheless. In October, the bill passed in Congress, by an overwhelming
majority. President Bill Clinton invoked a national-security waiver to prevent
its enactment, and so has every President since.
In 1999, Ehud
Barak, also of the Labor Party, became Prime Minister, and, as Rabin had, he
grew friendly with Clinton. “AIPAC flourishes when there is tension between
Israel and the U.S., because then they have a role to play,” Gadi Baltiansky,
who was Barak’s press spokesman, told me. “But the relations between Rabin and
Clinton, and then Barak and Clinton, were so good that AIPAC was not needed.
Barak gave them courtesy meetings. He just didn’t see them as real players.”
Still, the lobby maintained its sway in Congress. In 2000, Barak sent Beilin,
who was then the Justice Minister, to obtain money that Clinton had promised
Israel but never released. Beilin went to see Sandy Berger, Clinton’s
national-security adviser. “He said this money is tied to two hundred and
twenty-five million dollars in assistance to Egypt,” Beilin recalled. “We cannot
disburse the money to Israel unless we do to Egypt, so we need to convince
Congress to support the whole package. I said, ‘I am speaking on behalf of my
Prime Minister. We want Egypt to get the money.’ He said, ‘Yossi, this is really
wonderful. Do you know somebody in AIPAC?’ ”
Beilin was
astonished: “It was kind of Kafka—the U.S. national-security adviser is asking
the Minister of Justice in Israel whether he knows somebody at
AIPAC!” He went to see
Howard Kohr, the AIPAC C.E.O., a onetime employee of the Republican Jewish
Coalition whom a former U.S. government official described to me as “a
comfortable Likudnik.” Kohr told Beilin that it was impossible to allow Egypt to
get the money. “You may think it was wrong for Israel to vote for Barak as Prime
Minister—fine,” Beilin recalled saying. “But do you really believe that you
represent Israel more than all of us?” By the end of Barak’s term, in 2001, the
money had not been released, to Israel or to Egypt. “They always want to punish
the Arabs,” Beilin concluded. “They are a very rightist organization, which
doesn’t represent the majority of Jews in America, who are so Democratic and
liberal. They want to protect Israel from itself—especially when moderate people
are Israel’s leaders.”
In the spring of
2008, AIPAC moved from cramped quarters on Capitol Hill to a gleaming new
seven-story building on H Street, downtown. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony,
Howard Kohr introduced Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate who had been a generous
donor to AIPAC since the nineties, and who had helped underwrite congressional
trips to Israel (paying only for Republican members). On this bright spring day,
according to someone who was in the audience, Adelson recalled that Kohr had
telephoned him, asking him to have lunch. Adelson remembered wondering, How much
is this lunch going to cost me? Well, he went on, it cost him ten million
dollars: the building was the result. He later told his wife that Kohr should
have asked him for fifty million.
Netanyahu became Prime Minister the following year. AIPAC officials had been close to him since the eighties, when he worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and stuck with him when, in 1990, he was banned from the State Department for saying that U.S. policy was built “on a foundation of distortion and lies.” As Prime Minister, Netanyahu had a difficult relationship with Bill Clinton, largely because Clinton found him unwilling to stop the expansion of settlements and to meaningfully advance the peace process—a sharp contrast with the approach of Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995. Then as now, Netanyahu displayed a vivid sense of his own historical importance, as well as flashes of disdain for the American President. After their first meeting, Clinton sent a message to another Israeli, wryly complaining that he had emerged uncertain who, exactly, was the President of a superpower.
But, even if
Netanyahu had trouble with the executive branch, AIPAC could help deliver the
support of Congress, and a friendly Congress could take away the President’s
strongest negotiating chit—the multibillion-dollar packages of military aid that
go to Israel each year. The same dynamic was repeated during Barack Obama’s
first term. Israeli conservatives were wary, sensing that Obama, in their terms,
was a leftist, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. They took note when, during
the 2008 campaign, Obama said, “I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel
community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel
that you’re opposed to Israel, that you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the
measure of our friendship with Israel.”
At Obama’s first
meeting with Netanyahu, in May, 2009, Dermer came along, and found himself
unable to observe the well-established protocol that one does not interrupt the
President. As Obama spoke, Dermer’s hand shot up: “Excuse me, Mr. President, I
beg to differ!” Obama demanded a full settlement freeze, as a means of
convincing the Palestinians that Netanyahu was not merely stalling the
Americans. Netanyahu was incensed, and AIPAC rallied members of Congress to
protest. At an AIPAC conference, Dermer declared that Netanyahu would chart his
own course with the Palestinians: “The days of continuing down the same path of
weakness and capitulation and concessions, hoping—hoping—that somehow the
Palestinians would respond in kind, are over.” Applause swept the
room.
In a speech at
Bar-Ilan University, in June, 2009, Netanyahu seemed to endorse a two-state
solution, if in rather guarded terms. Leaders of the settler movement and even
many of Netanyahu’s Likud allies were furious at this seemingly historic shift
for the Party, though, with time, many of them interpreted the speech as a
tactical sop to the United States. No less
significant, perhaps, Netanyahu introduced a condition that could make a final
resolution impossible—the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a
Jewish state. “It was a stroke of political brilliance,” the former Senate aide,
who had worked closely with Dermer, told me. “He managed to take the two-state
issue off the table and put it back on the Palestinians.”
In March, 2010,
while Vice-President Joe Biden was visiting Israel, the Netanyahu government
announced that it was building sixteen hundred new housing units for Jews in
Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Biden said that the move
“undermines the trust we need right now.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
called Netanyahu to upbraid him. But, while Obama and his team viewed the move
as a political insult and yet another blow to a potential two-state solution,
AIPAC went into defensive mode, sending an e-mail to its members saying that the
Administration’s criticisms of Israel were “a matter of serious concern.” Soon
afterward, a letter circulated in the House calling on the Obama Administration
to “reinforce” the relationship. Three hundred and twenty-seven House members
signed it. A couple of months later, when the U.S. tried to extend a partial
moratorium on construction in settlements in the West Bank, AIPAC fought against
the extension. Obama eventually yielded.
In May, 2011,
Obama gave a speech about the Arab Spring, and, hoping to break the stalemate in
the peace talks, he said, “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based
on 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” The 1967 borders, with some
adjustments, had long been recognized as the foundation for a peace agreement,
but Obama was the first President to utter the words so explicitly. The next
day, Netanyahu arrived in Washington and rebuked him in the Oval Office, saying,
“We can’t go back to those indefensible lines.”
A veteran
Israeli politician was aghast at Netanyahu’s performance. “This is the President
of the United States of America, and you are the head of a client state—let’s
not forget that!” he said. “AIPAC should have come to Bibi and said, ‘You don’t
talk to the President the way you do! This is not done, you have to stop it!’
Instead of reflecting almost automatically everything the Israeli government is
doing and pushing in that direction.”
AIPAC officially
supports a two-state solution, but many of its members, and many of the speakers
at its conferences, loudly oppose such an agreement. Tom Dine has said that the
lobby’s tacit position is “We’ll work against it until it happens.” After Obama
endorsed the 1967 borders, AIPAC members called Congress to express outrage.
“They wanted the President to feel the heat from Israel’s friends on the Hill,”
a former Israeli official recalled. “They were saying to the Administration,
‘You must rephrase, you must correct!’ ” When Obama appeared at an AIPAC policy
conference three days later, he was conciliatory: “The parties
themselves—Israelis and Palestinians—will negotiate a border that is different
than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. That’s what ‘mutually agreed-upon
swaps’ means.” AIPAC had e-mailed videos to attendees, urging them not to boo
the President; they complied, offering occasional wan applause. The next day,
Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress and received twenty-nine
standing ovations.
Fifty years ago,
before Israel became an undeclared nuclear power and its existence was under
threat, any differences it had with the U.S. were usually aired in private.
Today, the political dynamics in both countries—and the particulars of the
relationship—have evolved. A majority of Israelis still favor the idea of a
two-state solution, but the political mood has shifted markedly to the right.
The reasons range from the deeply felt notion that the Palestinians were
“offered the world and rejected it” to the rise of Hamas in Gaza, from the
aftershock of terror attacks a decade ago to the instability throughout the
Middle East. Likud has rejected relative moderates like Dan Meridor and Benny
Begin; Netanyahu himself is considered a “dove” by some leaders of his
coalition and members of his party. The consensus deepens that Oslo was a
failure, and that, as Netanyahu says, “there is no partner for peace.” The
Palestinians, for their part, argue that the settlements in the West Bank and
Jewish expansion into East Jerusalem have created a “one-state reality.” They
point out that members of Netanyahu’s coalition reject a two-state solution—“The
land is ours!”—and endorse permanent Israeli control, or outright annexation, of
the West Bank.
Netanyahu prides
himself on understanding the American political climate. But his deepest
relationships are with older, often wealthy members of the establishments in New
York and Los Angeles, and he is less conscious of the changes in American
demographics and in opinion among younger American Jews. Assaf Sharon, the
research director of Molad, a progressive think tank in Jerusalem, said, “When
Israelis see House members jump like springs to applaud every lame comment Bibi
utters, they think he is a star in Washington. Then they are told by the
local pundits that everything else is just personal friction with Obama. My
sense is that the people surrounding Bibi—and the Prime Minister himself—don’t
appreciate the significance of the shift.’
Yet the rhetoric
of Netanyahu’s circle has never been more confident. In a recent talk, Dermer
argued that Israel is a regional superpower, with much to give in its
relationship with the U.S. “America’s most important ally in the twentieth
century was Great Britain,” he said. “Your most important ally in the
twenty-first century is going to be the State of Israel.” In a meeting with
young Likud supporters last spring, which one of them transcribed online,
Netanyahu boasted of defying Obama’s pressure to halt settlements; 2013 was a
record year for settlement construction in the West Bank. He preferred to “stand
up to international pressure by maneuvering,” he said. “What matters is that we
continue to head straight toward our goal, even if one time we walk right and
another time walk left.” When one of the Likudniks asked about peace talks with
the Palestinians, Netanyahu is said to have replied, as the audience laughed,
“About the—what?”
AIPAC’s hold on
Congress has become institutionalized. Each year, a month or two before the
annual policy conference, AIPAC officials tell key members what measures they
want, so that their activists have something to lobby for. “Every year, we
create major legislation, so they can justify their existence to their members,”
the former congressional aide said. (AIPAC maintains that only members of
Congress initiate legislative action.) AIPAC board
meetings are held in Washington each month, and directors visit members of
Congress. They generally address them by their first names, even if they haven’t
met before. The intimacy is presumed, but also, at times, earned; local AIPAC
staffers, in the manner of basketball recruiters, befriend some members when
they are still serving on the student council. “If you have a dream about
running for office, AIPAC calls you,” one House member said. Certainly, it’s a
rarity when someone undertakes a campaign for the House or the Senate today
without hearing from AIPAC.
In 1996, Brian
Baird, a psychologist from Seattle, decided to run for Congress. Local Democrats
asked if he had thought about what he was going to say to AIPAC. “I had admired
Israel since I was a kid,” Baird told me. “But I also was fairly sympathetic to
peaceful resolution and the Palestinian side. These people said, ‘We respect
that, but let’s talk about the issues and what you might say.’ The difficult
reality is this: in order to get elected to Congress, if you’re not
independently wealthy, you have to raise a lot of money. And you learn pretty
quickly that, if AIPAC is on your side, you can do that. They come to you and
say, ‘We’d be happy to host ten-thousand-dollar fund-raisers for you, and let us
help write your annual letter, and please come to this multi-thousand-person
dinner.’ ” Baird continued, “Any member of Congress knows that AIPAC is
associated indirectly with significant amounts of campaign spending if you’re
with them, and significant amounts against you if you’re not with them.” For
Baird, AIPAC-connected money amounted to about two hundred thousand dollars in
each of his races—“and that’s two hundred thousand going your way, versus the
other way: a four-hundred-thousand-dollar swing.”
The
contributions, as with many interest groups, come with a great deal of tactical
input. “The AIPAC people do a very good job of ‘informing’ you about the
issues,” Baird told me. “It literally gets down to ‘No, we don’t say it that
way, we say it this way.’ Always phrased as a friendly suggestion—but it’s
pretty clear you don’t want to say ‘occupied territories’! There’s a whole
complex semantic code you learn. . . . After a while, you find yourself saying
and repeating it as if it were fact.”
Soon after
taking office, Baird went on a “virtually obligatory” trip to Israel: a freshman
ritual in which everything—business-class flights, accommodations at the King
David or the Citadel—is paid for by AIPAC’s charitable arm. The tours are
carefully curated. “They do have you meet with the Palestinian leaders, in a
sort of token process,” Baird said. “But then when you’re done with it they tell
you everything the Palestinian leaders said that’s wrong. And, of course, the
Palestinians don’t get to have dinner with you at the hotel that
night.”
In early 2009,
after a brief truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed in a series of mutual
provocations, Israel carried out Operation Cast Lead, an incursion into Gaza in
which nearly fourteen hundred Palestinians were killed, along with thirteen
Israelis. Baird visited the area a few weeks later and returned several times.
As he wrote in an op-ed, he saw “firsthand the devastating destruction of
hospitals, schools, homes, industries, and infrastructure.” That September, the
U.N. Human Rights Council issued a report, based on an inquiry led by the South
African jurist Richard Goldstone, that accused Israel of a series of possible
war crimes. AIPAC attacked the report, saying it was “rigged.” A month later, an
AIPAC-sponsored resolution to condemn the report was introduced in the House,
and three hundred and forty-four members voted in favor. “I read every single
word of that report, and it comported with what I had seen and heard on the
ground in Gaza,” Baird said. “When we had the vote, I said, ‘We have member
after member coming to the floor to vote on a resolution they’ve never read,
about a report they’ve never seen, in a place they’ve never been.’ ” Goldstone
came under such pressure that threats were made to ban him from his grandson’s
bar mitzvah at a Johannesburg synagogue. He eventually wrote an op-ed in which
he expressed regret for his conclusions, saying, “Civilians were not
intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” Other members of the council
stood by the report.
In 2010, Baird
decided not to run again for the House; he is now the president of Antioch
University Seattle. Few current members of Congress are as outspoken about AIPAC
as Baird. Staff members fret about whether AIPAC will prevent them from getting
a good consulting job when they leave government. “You just hear the name!” a
Senate aide said. “You hear that they are involved and everyone’s ears perk up
and their mood changes, and they start to fall in line in a certain
way.”
Baird said,
“When key votes are cast, the question on the House floor, troublingly, is often
not ‘What is the right thing to do for the United States of America?’ but ‘How
is AIPAC going to score this?’ ” He added, “There’s such a conundrum here, of
believing that you’re supporting Israel, when you’re actually backing policies
that are antithetical to its highest values and, ultimately, destructive for the
country.” In talks with Israeli officials, he found that his inquiries were not
treated with much respect. In 2003, one of his constituents, Rachel Corrie, was
killed by a bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier, as she protested the
demolition of Palestinians’ homes in Gaza. At first, he said, the officials told
him, “There’s a simple explanation—here are the facts.” Or, “We will look into
it.” But, when he continued to press, something else would emerge. “There is a
disdain for the U.S., and a dismissal of any legitimacy of our right to
question—because who are we to talk about moral values?” Baird told me. “Whether
it’s that we didn’t help early enough in the Holocaust, or look at what we did
to our African-Americans, or our Native Americans—whatever! And they see us,
members of Congress, as basically for sale. So they want us to shut up and play
the game.”
In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two leading political scientists of the realist school, published a book called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” The book, a best-seller, presented a scathing portrait of AIPAC, arguing that the lobby had a nearly singular distorting influence on American foreign policy, and even that it was a central factor in the rush to war in Iraq. While the authors’ supporters praised their daring, their critics argued that they had neglected to point out any failures of the Palestinian leadership, and painted AIPAC in conspiratorial, omnipotent tones. Even Noam Chomsky, a fierce critic of Israel from the left, wrote that the authors had exaggerated the influence of AIPAC, and that other special interests, like the energy lobby, had greater influence on Middle East policy.
A broader
political challenge to AIPAC came in 2009, with the founding of J Street, a
“pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy group. Led by Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former Clinton
Administration aide whose grandparents were among the first settlers in Tel
Aviv, J Street was founded to appeal to American Jews who strongly support a
two-state solution and who see the occupation as a threat to democracy and to
Jewish values. J Street has only a tiny fraction of AIPAC’s financial power and
influence on Capitol Hill, but it has tried to provide at least some campaign
funding to weaken the lobby’s grip.
AIPAC and its
allies have responded aggressively. This year, the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations voted not to admit J Street, because, as the
leader of one Orthodox alliance said to the Times, its “positions are out of the
mainstream of what could be considered acceptable within the Jewish community.”
Danny Ayalon, the former Israeli Ambassador, told me, “When Jewish organizations
join the political campaign to delegitimatize Israel, they are really
undermining our security collectively. Because I do believe that, if Israel’s
security is compromised, so is that of every Jew in the world.”
Many Israeli and
Palestinian leaders have taken note of the rise of J Street and, without
overestimating its capacities, see that it represents an increasing diversity of
opinion in the American Jewish community. At the last J Street convention, in
Washington, Husam Zomlot, a rising figure in Fatah, the largest faction in the
P.L.O., delivered a speech about the Palestinian cause and got a standing
ovation. “AIPAC is not as effective as it was,” Zomlot said. “I wouldn’t say J
Street is the mainstream representative of Jewish Americans, but it is a trend
that gives you some sense of where things are and what is happening. Though it
has limited funding, it is the first organized Jewish group with a different
agenda in Washington since Israel was established. It’s worth
noticing.”
Some politicians
in Washington have indeed noticed, and not always to their benefit. Soon after J
Street got started, it endorsed Robert Wexler, a Democratic congressman who
represented a South Florida district. “Some AIPAC people told me they would not
support me anymore if I went to a J Street event or took their support,” Wexler
recalled. “I called them and said, ‘You’ve supported me for twelve years. You’re
not going to support me because somebody from J Street endorsed me?’ ” Wexler
added, “AIPAC is still by a factor of a hundred to one the premier lobbying
organization for the Jewish community. I’ll never understand why they care one
iota about J Street—but they have this bizarre fixation on it.”
Jan Schakowsky,
who has represented a liberal Chicago district since 1999, was another of J
Street’s first endorsees. For years, she had maintained good relations with
AIPAC, whose members* gave money to her campaigns and praised her positions. She
voted to condemn the Goldstone report and signed a 2010 letter urging the
Administration to keep any differences with Israel private. But in her 2010
race, she was challenged by Joel Pollak, an Orthodox Jew, who argued that she
was insufficiently supportive of Israel. “We were very much aware that
AIPAC-associated people were fund-raising for Jan’s opponent,” Dylan Williams,
the director of government affairs for J Street, said. A small but vocal
contingent of AIPAC members were behind Pollak. But he was also backed by the
Tea Party, which J Street believed might drive away other Jewish voters. The new
lobby raised seventy-five thousand dollars for Schakowsky (through its PAC,
whose financial contributions are publicly disclosed), and she won by a wide
margin. “It was exactly the type of race we had hoped for!” Williams said. “A
lot of the power of AIPAC is based on this perception, which I believe is a
myth, that if you cross their line you will be targeted, and your opponent in
your next race will receive all this money, and it will make a difference.”
Still, Schakowsky told me, the process was painful. “Getting booed in a
synagogue was not a pleasure,” she said. “This is not just my base—it’s my
family!” She added, “Increasingly, Israel has become a wedge issue, something to
be used against the President by the Republicans, and it can be very
unhelpful.”
AIPAC is still
capable of mounting a show of bipartisanship. At this year’s policy conference,
Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic Whip, appeared onstage with Eric Cantor, then
the Republican House Majority Leader, and together they rhapsodized about the
summer trip they routinely took, leading groups of mostly freshmen on an AIPAC
tour of Israel. “Few things are as meaningful as watching your colleagues
discover the Jewish state for the very first time,” Cantor said.
Hoyer offered a
benediction: “We Baptists would say, ‘Amen.’ ”
Cantor and Hoyer
have been steadfast supporters of AIPAC, and its members have held at least a
dozen fund-raisers for them each year. But last December AIPAC’s efforts to
implement sanctions against Iran were so intense that even this well-tempered
partnership fractured. When Congress returned from its Thanksgiving recess,
legislators in the House began discussing a sanctions bill. According to the
former congressional aide, Cantor told Hoyer that he wanted a bill that would
kill the interim agreement with Iran. Hoyer refused, saying that he would
collaborate only on a nonbinding resolution.
Cantor sent
Hoyer a resolution that called for additional sanctions and sought to define in
advance the contours of an agreement with Iran. “The pressure was tremendous—not
just AIPAC leadership and legislative officials but various board members and
other contributors, from all over the country,” the former congressional aide
recalled. “What was striking was how strident the message was,” another aide
said. ‘How could you not pass a resolution that tells the President what the
outcome of the negotiations has to be?’ ” Advocates for the sanctions portrayed
Obama as feckless. “They said, ‘Iranians have been doing this for millennia.
They can smell weakness. Why is the President showing weakness?’ ” a Senate aide
recalled.
AIPAC was
betting that the Democrats, facing midterms with an unpopular President, would
break ranks, and that Obama would be unable to stop them. Its confidence was not
unfounded; every time Netanyahu and AIPAC had opposed Obama, he had retreated.
But Obama took up the fight with unusual vigor. He has been deeply interested in
nonproliferation since his college days, and he has been searching for an
opening with Iran since his Presidential campaign in 2008. As the Cantor-Hoyer
resolution gathered momentum, House Democrats began holding meetings at the
White House to strategize about how to oppose it.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, attended the meetings, at some political risk. Wasserman Schultz represents a heavily Jewish district in South Florida, and has been a reliable signature on AIPAC’s letters and resolutions; she has boasted of concurring with a hundred per cent of its positions. Now the lobby e-mailed out an “AIPAC Action Alert,” including the text of a story about the meetings in the conservative Washington Free Beacon, in which she was described as “siding with the Mullahs over the American people.” The alert asked AIPAC’s executive-council members to contact her office, ask if the story was true, and challenge her opposition to Cantor-Hoyer. Stephen Fiske, the chair of the pro-Israel Florida Congressional Committee PAC, sent a similar alert to Wasserman Schultz’s constituents, setting off a cascade of calls to her office. (Fiske told the Free Beacon that the callers included a team of young students: his son’s classmates at a Jewish day school in North Miami Beach.) Wasserman Schultz was furious. Soon afterward, she flew to Israel for the funeral of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. On the trip, she remarked to a colleague, “They’re doing this to me?”
But as the
meetings continued Democrats began to build a consensus. In December, Ester
Kurz, AIPAC’s director of legislative strategy, went to see Nancy Pelosi, the
Minority Leader, to urge her to pass the resolution. Pelosi resisted, pointing
out that many members of Hoyer’s caucus strongly opposed it. David Price, a
Democrat, and Charles Dent, a Republican, had written a letter to the President,
urging him to use the diplomatic opening that followed Rouhani’s election to
attempt a nuclear agreement; it garnered a hundred and thirty-one signatures.
Pointing to the letter, Pelosi demanded to know why AIPAC wanted this
resolution, at this time.
The members of
Hoyer’s caucus pressed him, and, on December 12th, just as the language of the
resolution became final, he asked to set aside the effort, saying that the time
was not right. His demurral—from someone who had rarely disappointed AIPAC—was a
sign that the lobby might be in uncharted terrain. Two weeks after local AIPAC
activists pressured Wasserman Schultz, a national board member issued a
statement that called her “a good friend of Israel and a close friend of
AIPAC.”
The crucial
fight, though, was in the Senate. A couple of days before the Christmas recess,
Robert Menendez and Mark Kirk introduced their sanctions bill, the Nuclear
Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013. At first, senators were eager to express
support—previous Iran-sanctions bills had passed by votes of 99–0—and, by the
second week of January, Menendez and Kirk had secured the votes of fifty-nine
senators, including sixteen Democrats. One more vote would enable the bill’s
supporters to overcome a filibuster. A number of senators facing reëlection were
told by AIPAC contacts that fund-raisers would be cancelled if they did not sign
on, according to several employees of another lobby. (AIPAC denies
this.)
In January,
though, AIPAC’s effort stalled. Some senators complained that the bill called
for immediate sanctions. In fact, a close reading of the bill makes plain that
most of the sanctions would become active ninety days after enactment. But the
sanctions, ostensibly intended to put pressure on the Iranian negotiators, were
designed to go into effect automatically, no matter how the nuclear talks went.
The bill also dictated to negotiators the acceptable terms of an agreement, and
committed the U.S. to support any defensive military action that Israel took
against Iran. On the Senate floor, Dianne Feinstein gave a pointed speech, in
which she warned that, if the bill passed, “diplomatic negotiations will
collapse,” and said, “We cannot let Israel determine when and where the
United States goes to war.” Ten Senate committee chairmen—including
Feinstein, who serves on the Select Committee on Intelligence, and Carl Levin,
of Michigan, the head of the Armed Services Committee—wrote to Harry Reid,
noting that the intelligence community believed that new sanctions would
effectively halt the negotiations.
At the same
time, AIPAC was urging Reid to bring the measure to a vote—and, as the former
congressional aide noted, “you don’t alienate a key fund-raising base,
especially when you may be about to lose the Senate.” But the pressure from the
White House was even greater. Brad Gordon, AIPAC’s longtime legislative
official, said ruefully, “I have not seen the Administration act with such force
and such sustained effort . . . since Obama became President.” At a meeting with
several dozen Democratic senators in January, Obama spoke at length about Iran,
warning of the possibility of war. Senator Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, said
later that the President “was as good as I’ve ever heard him.” As congressional
Democrats continued to meet in the White House Obama’s press secretary, Jay
Carney, referred to the proposed sanctions as part of a “march to war.” Not long
afterward, Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said, “If
certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they
should be up front with the American public and say so.” Congressional offices
were inundated with calls from constituents alarmed by the prospect of war. The
decisive moment came in the State of the Union speech, when Obama said plainly,
“If this Congress sends me a new sanctions bill now that threatens to derail
these talks, I will veto it.”
About a week
later, forty-two Republican senators sent a letter to Reid, demanding that he
bring Menendez-Kirk to a vote, and noting that he had already “taken
unprecedented steps to take away the rights of the minority in the Senate.”
Reid’s staff members urged AIPAC officials to stop pressing for the bill; their
office had been open to a bipartisan process, they argued, but siding with the
Republicans against Obama was hardly bipartisan. According to a former Senate
aide, the lobbyists seemed to realize that if they continued to push they would
have to give up any claim to bipartisanship. Two days later, AIPAC issued a
statement saying that the time was not right for a vote; Menendez issued a
similar statement. “That was the fundamental moment when Menendez-Kirk lost,”
the aide said.
AIPAC had
sustained a painful defeat—and its annual policy conference was only a few weeks
away. The day before the conference, according to a senior House Democrat,
“AIPAC still did not have its ‘ask’ together.” Instead of dictating the terms of
legislation, the lobby struggled to negotiate letters to the President, urging
him to support sanctions. In the end, Cantor and Hoyer’s resolution was reduced
to a letter, circulated in the House, that was so anodyne that most Democrats in
the progressive caucus signed it.
Some of the
House Democrats who had fought against the resolution were enjoying a new sense
of confidence. For a month, David Price and his fellow-Democrat Lloyd Doggett
had been gathering support for a letter to the President, saying that Congress
should “give diplomacy a chance.” They expected to get perhaps forty signatures.
Instead, they got a hundred and four, including those of four Republicans.
“AIPAC tried to peel some away, but what’s striking is how few we lost,” Price
said. A handful of Jewish members signed, including Jan Schakowsky. Wasserman
Schultz did not. “It was a difficult policy spot for all of us, as Jewish
members,” Schakowsky said. But, had the Cantor-Hoyer resolution passed, she
continued, “it would have created an atmosphere surrounding the bargaining table
that the President could not bargain in good faith. And it would for the first
time have dramatically divided the Democrats.”
John Yarmuth, of
Kentucky, another Jewish member who signed the letter, said, “AIPAC clearly has
a great deal of clout in the Republican conference, and many Democrats still
think that they have to be responsive to it.” But he believes that the letter
was an important measure of congressional restiveness. “I think there is a
growing sense among members that things are done just to placate AIPAC, and that
AIPAC is not really working to advance what is in the interest of the United
States.” He concluded, “We all took an oath of office. And AIPAC, in many
instances, is asking us to ignore it.”
A few months
later, the Gaza war began, and AIPAC mobilized again. “There were conference
calls, mass e-mails, talking points for the day,” a congressional aide said.
“AIPAC activists would e-mail me, with fifteen other AIPAC activists cc’d, and
then those people would respond, saying, ‘I agree entirely with what the first
e-mail said!’ ”
It didn’t hurt AIPAC’s cause that the enemy was Hamas, whose suicide bombings a decade ago killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, and whose rocket attacks in recent years have terrorized citizens, particularly in southern Israel. As Israel pressed its offensive, and hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed, AIPAC argued, as did Netanyahu, that the casualties came only because Hamas was using human shields. Online, AIPAC posted a short film, “Israel’s Moral Defense,” which depicted an Israeli major in a quandary. Looking at a schoolyard filled with girls in neat uniforms, he sees fighters with a rocket launcher not far behind them. Should he order his men to fire their machine guns, and risk hitting the girls, or hold back, and risk the rocket killing Israelis? “I didn’t pull the trigger,” the soldier says. “We are totally different. . . . I am very proud to be in an army that has this level of morality.” A couple of weeks after the film appeared, Israeli shells struck a United Nations school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing twenty-one people and injuring more than ninety; it was the sixth U.N. school that Israel had bombed. The next day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, pointed out that, as Israeli forces attacked homes, schools, and hospitals, the U.S. was supplying them with heavy weaponry. Almost simultaneously, the House passed an AIPAC-supported resolution denouncing Hamas’s use of human shields and condemning an inquiry into Israel’s Gaza operations that Pillay was sponsoring.
According to
congressional staffers, some members of Congress seemed eager to make up for
their recent apostasy on the Iran negotiations. While Reid and his colleagues
went to extraordinary lengths to fund the Iron Dome missile-defense system, the
House leadership engaged in the same mission. The vote in the House came late on
the night of Friday, August 1st—the last possible moment before the summer
recess. The earlier resolutions that AIPAC had sponsored during the war had
passed unanimously, with no record of individual votes, but on this vote the
roll was called. (AIPAC sometimes asks congressional leaders to call the roll
when a decisive victory seems likely.) “I think AIPAC thought this vote would be
one hundred per cent,” Jim Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, said. It was close:
out of four hundred and thirty-five members, only eight voted no. Moran, who has
been in Congress since 1990, and is retiring this year, was one of four
Democrats who voted against the resolution. As a longtime member of the Defense
Appropriations Committee, he did not believe that there was any urgent need for
the funding. “We have put about nine hundred million dollars into the Iron
Dome,” he argued. “We know that there are many millions unexpended in Israel’s
Iron Dome account. And Israel was to get three hundred and fifty-one million on
October 1st, for Iron Dome.”
Beto O’Rourke, a
freshman Democrat from El Paso, also voted against the funding. “I tried to find
him on the floor, but I couldn’t,” Moran said. “I wanted him to switch his vote.
Now, he might not have switched it anyway, because—as shocking as it may be—he’s
in Congress solely to do what he considers to be the right thing. I’m afraid he
may have a tough race in November.” The morning after the vote, O’Rourke
e-mailed a local AIPAC activist, Stuart Schwartz, to explain his vote, according
to a knowledgeable person. In his explanation, which he also posted on Facebook,
he pointed out that he had voted for Iron Dome in the past, and had supported
the funds that were scheduled to arrive in October. But, he wrote, “I could not
in good conscience vote for borrowing $225 million more to send to Israel,
without debate and without discussion, in the midst of a war that has cost more
than a thousand civilian lives already, too many of them children.”
Within
hours, O’Rourke was flooded with e-mails, texts, and calls. The next day, the El
Paso Times ran a front-page story with the headline “O’ROURKE VOTE DRAWS
CRITICISM.” In the story, Stuart Schwartz, who is described as having donated a
thousand dollars to O’Rourke’s previous campaign, commented that O’Rourke
“chooses to side with the rocket launchers and terror tunnel builders.” A mass
e-mail circulated, reading “The Following Is Shameful, El Paso Has an
Anti-Israel Congressman. . . . Do Not Reëlect Beto O’Rourke.” At the bottom was
the address of AIPAC’s Web site, and a snippet of text: “AIPAC is directly
responsible for the overwhelming support this legislation received on the Hill.
If you are not a member of AIPAC, I strongly recommend that you join. Every
dollar helps fund this important work in Congress.”
The day that
Congress passed the Iron Dome bills happened to be an especially deadly one in
Gaza. In the city of Rafah, Israeli troops pursued Hamas fighters with such
overwhelming force that about a hundred and fifty Palestinians were killed, many
of them women and children. Israel’s critics in the region have been energized.
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian legislator, told me that Congress had sent a clear
message by funding Iron Dome that day. “Congress was telling Israel, ‘You go
ahead and kill, and we will fund it for you.’ ” She argued that Israelis had
dominated American political discourse on the war, as they have for decades on
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “They say, ‘The Palestinians are all
terrorists, they are the people we don’t know, they are alien, foreign,
strange—but Israelis are like us.’ Who shaped the presentation, in the U.S.?
AIPAC, to a large degree.”
Yet the war has
broad support in Israel. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, just six
per cent of the Jewish population believes that the Israeli Army has used
excessive force. Of those who expressed an opinion, almost half believe that the
force has not been severe enough. The left, finding itself increasingly
isolated, is deeply critical of AIPAC. Zeev Sternhell, a leading Israeli
intellectual and an expert on European fascism, told me, “I consider AIPAC’s
role to have been absolutely disastrous, because it prevents any possibility to
move with the Palestinians. We cannot move without American intervention—but we
are more or less free of American intervention. This is AIPAC’s job. So the
present coalition has this sentiment of impunity.”
In the U.S., the
war has created tense disagreement, dividing left and right, young and old.
Congress showed no such uncertainty, which is a triumph for AIPAC. But the lobby
also faces an inevitable question about the extent to which young liberals like
O’Rourke represent the future. When I asked Dore Gold, an external adviser to
the Netanyahu government, about AIPAC’s prospects, he spoke in determinedly
upbeat tones, dismissing the Iran-sanctions episode. “A political loss does not
necessarily mean that a political organization has reached its sunset years,” he
said. “To the contrary, it can give added motivation for people who are
concerned with the implications of Iran crossing the nuclear threshold.” Still,
he said, “when issues become so partisan, it is harder for an organization like
AIPAC. You have to fight that.” For decades, AIPAC has maintained a hugely
successful model, creating widespread support from an unlikely base, and tapping
into a seemingly endless wellspring of support from the American Jewish
community. But bipartisanship is a relic now, and a generation of unquestioning
adherents is aging. Like its embattled allies in Congress, AIPAC needs to reach
constituents who represent the country as it will look in the coming
decades.
At AIPAC’s
policy conference last March, Olga Miranda, the president of S.E.I.U. Local 87,
gazed out at the crowd that filled the darkened Washington Convention Center—a
gathering she dubbed the “Jewish Super Bowl.” Large video screens displayed her
image. A lively woman with long black hair and a commanding voice, Miranda
proclaimed, “I am a union leader, I am Joaquin’s mother, I am one of nine
children raised by a single mother, I am a Chicana—and I am AIPAC!” For years,
she explained, her information about the Middle East had come from television,
and she sympathized with the Palestinians, until one day she got a call from
someone at AIPAC who asked her if she’d be interested in a trip to Israel. That
trip changed her life, she said. Now she argues about Israel with her friends
and colleagues. “See you on the picket lines!” she shouted.
“The face of pro-Israel activists has changed pretty dramatically,” David Victor, a former AIPAC president, told me. In the past eight years, AIPAC has reached out to Hispanics, African-Americans, and evangelical Christians, in the hope that greater diversity will translate into continued support in Congress. Victor pointed out that this year’s AIPAC conference was bigger than ever. In 2008, when he was president, eight thousand members attended; this year, there were fourteen thousand, including two hundred and sixty student-government presidents. “These are future opinion leaders,” he said.
Those opinion
leaders face a difficult task when they return to campus. Many young American
Jews believe that criticism is vital to Israel’s survival as a democratic state.
Some are even helping to support a campaign known as B.D.S., for Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions, which is aimed at ending the occupation and
recognizing the rights of Palestinian refugees and citizens. In June, the U.S.
branch of the Presbyterian church voted to divest from three companies seen as
profiting from the military occupation of the West Bank. (One was Caterpillar,
the construction-equipment company, which Rachel Corrie’s parents had sued,
unsuccessfully.) The church took care to affirm Israel’s right to exist and to
disavow an endorsement of the B.D.S. movement. J Street, likewise, has said that
B.D.S. can be “a convenient mantle for thinly disguised anti-Semitism.” But the
movement persists, particularly on campuses and in left-wing circles.
Ironically,
there is also a threat to AIPAC from the right. Many American conservatives were
enraged by the perception that AIPAC had surrendered in the fight for Iran
sanctions. Shortly after Menendez set aside his efforts to pass the bill, AIPAC
issued a statement vowing to try again later. “They did that because there was
an eruption from the other side,” a former Senate aide said. “ ‘How could you
sell out the Republican caucus, when we were advocating exactly what Bibi
Netanyahu was!’ ” Republicans were frustrated by the lobby’s refusal to move
forward at the expense of Democrats, the aide said: “I know AIPAC has its
commitment to bipartisanship. But what good is that commitment if in the end you
don’t achieve your policy objective?”
For AIPAC’s most
severe conservative critics, its attempts to occupy a diminishing sliver of
middle ground are unacceptable. Recently, Sheldon Adelson, who funded AIPAC’s
new office building a few years ago, has been increasing his support for the
right-wing Zionist Organization of America. Mort Klein, the head of the Z.O.A.,
told me, “Adelson is not happy with AIPAC, clearly.” Several people affiliated
with the right-wing Jewish movement told me that significant donors are talking
about founding a new organization.
Caught between
the increasingly right-leaning Israel and the increasingly fractious United
States, AIPAC has little space to maneuver. Wittmann, the spokesman, said, “Our
positions in support of the Oslo process and the two-state solution have
generated criticism from some on the right, just as our stand for strong
prospective Iran sanctions has spurred criticism from some on the left”—a
statement of bipartisan intent, but also of the difficulty of contemporary
politics. Recently, the lobby has begun another outreach effort, focussed on
progressive Democrats. At the conference, Olga Miranda and Ann Lewis, a senior
adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign, spoke on a panel called
“The Progressive Case for Israel.”
Lewis told me that she has recently been
involved in conversations with AIPAC staff and board members about finding ways
to improve AIPAC’s connections with progressive Democrats. “They are exploring
how to reach progressives, but they’re lost on this!” a leader in the pro-Israel
community who is knowledgeable about the effort said. “They don’t know how to
bridge the gap. People see AIPAC as representing issues that are anathema to
them. It’s an enormous challenge.”
At the
conference, the extent of the challenge was clear. Even Netanyahu seemed struck
by the mood. At one point in his speech, he said, “I hope that the Palestinian
leadership will stand with Israel and the United States on the right side of the
moral divide, the side of peace, reconciliation, and hope.” The audience members
responded with scant, listless applause. “You can clap,” the Prime Minister
said. ♦
