Inside the Zionist Lobby (AIPAC)
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.”
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.
December 22, 2003“It’s supposed to be a comedy, so I’ve had Steve, here, red-flag the
funny parts.”
“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.
posted by Gert @ 4:04 PM
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