| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"peace.seeker.27" |
| Date: |
16 Jul 2006 05:10:01 AM |
| Object: |
Washington Post confirms Israel lobby's power |
A Beautiful Friendship?
In search of the truth about the Israel lobby's influence on Washington
By Glenn Frankel
Sunday, July 16, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR200607120=
1627.html
All David Ben-Gurion wanted was 15 minutes of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's time.
Israel's founding father, one of the indomitable political leaders of
the 20th century, came to Washington in December 1941 yearning to
present the case for a Jewish state directly to the American president.
He took a two-room suite at the old Ambassador Hotel at 14th and K for
$1,000 a month and cooled his heels for 10 weeks, writing letters and
reports and making passes at Miriam Cohen, his attractive American
secretary. But Ben-Gurion didn't get the meeting. Not then, not ever.
Not even a pair of presidential cuff links.
Now let's fast-forward 64 years to late May and a news conference in
the East Room of the White House. That tall, freckled, slightly
nervous-looking man with the rust-colored hair standing alongside
President Bush at matching lecterns is Ehud Olmert, 12th prime minister
of Israel. The two leaders and their advisers have just spent two hours
together in the Oval Office. Bush is reaffirming the "deep and abiding
ties between Israel and the United States" and praising Olmert's "bold
ideas" and commitment to peace. Afterward, they'll adjourn for a
private session without aides or note-takers and then go to dinner
together. And the next day Olmert will address a joint session of
Congress, whose members will interrupt his speech with 16 standing
ovations. Ben-Gurion, whose remains rest in a simple grave overlooking
the Negev Desert, would be stunned.
It's not that Olmert is a more commanding figure than Ben-Gurion. Far
from it. No, it's about power. And not just Israeli power. It's really
about the perceived power of the Israel lobby, a collection of American
Jewish organizations, campaign contributors and think tanks -- aided by
Christian conservatives and other non-Jewish supporters -- that arose
over the second half of the 20th century and that sees as a principle
goal the support and promotion of the interests of the state of Israel.
Thanks to the work of the lobby and its allies, Israel gets more direct
foreign aid -- about $3 billion a year -- than any other nation.
There's a file cabinet somewhere in the State Department full of
memoranda of understanding on military, diplomatic and economic
affairs. Israel gets treated like a NATO member when it comes to
military matters and like Canada or Mexico when it comes to free trade.
There's an annual calendar full of meetings of joint strategic task
forces and other collaborative sessions. And there's a presidential
pledge, re-avowed by Bush in the East Room, that the United States will
come to Israel's aid in the event of attack.
On Capitol Hill the Israel lobby commands large majorities in both the
House and Senate. Polls show strong public support for Israel -- a
connection that has grown even deeper after the September 11 attacks.
The popular equation goes like this: Israelis equal good guys, Arabs
equal terrorists. Working the Hill these days, says Josh Block,
spokesman for the premier Israeli lobbying group known as AIPAC, the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, "is like pushing at an open
door."
Not everyone believes this is a good thing. In March two distinguished
political scientists -- Stephen Walt from Harvard and John Mearsheimer
from the University of Chicago -- published a 42-page, heavily
footnoted essay arguing that the Bush administration's support for
Israel and its related effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle
East have "inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S.
security."
The professors claim that our intimate partnership with Israel is both
dangerous and unprecedented. "Other special interest groups have
managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it
as far from what the national interest would suggest," they argue. They
go on to say that the war in Iraq "was due in large part to the Lobby's
influence," and that the same combine is "using all of the strategies
in its playbook" to pressure the administration into being aggressive
and belligerent with Iran. The bottom line: "Israel's enemies get
weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians,
and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and
paying."
A sweet deal for Israel, in other words, but a very bad one for
America.
Some of the lobby's critics hailed the essay as a much-needed breath of
fresh air and praised Walt and Mearsheimer for their courage and --
dare we say it -- chutzpah. Their paper, wrote antiwar activist and
media critic Norman Solomon in the Baltimore Sun, "is prying the lid
off a debate that has been bottled up for decades."
But the two professors knew they were treading on delicate ground. For
generations, the idea of a cabal of powerful Jews hijacking the
national interest for its own purposes has fueled anti-Semitism around
the world. Supporters of Israel argued that the essay echoed those
claims.
Alan Dershowitz, author, lawyer, celebrity and Harvard professor, said
the essay is rife with "bigoted comments" and "the smell of singling
out Jews and singling out Israel." Abraham Foxman, longtime director of
the Anti-Defamation League, told me the paper
essentially, and erroneously, blames the Jews for the war in Iraq.
Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the United States, who hadn't
commented publicly until our interview, called it "tainted, shallow and
sloppy . . . just a compilation of old nonsense and garbage that should
be rendered into oblivion, where it belongs."
Walt and Mearsheimer in response insist their facts and arguments
remain valid and say the vituperative critical reaction merely affirms
one of their key points: that the Israel lobby is a sacred cow and
anyone who dares criticize it runs the risk of being branded an
anti-Semite. "In effect, the Lobby boasts of its own power and then
attacks anyone who calls attention to it," they complain in the essay.
We'll get back to the angry volleyball match between the professors and
their critics a bit later. But, flaws and all, the essay has raised
some compelling questions. Such as: Just how powerful is the Israel
lobby? What was its role in engineering the Iraq war, and is it pushing
for a repeat performance in Iran? Is it really all that nefarious? And
whose lobby is it anyway?
MORRIS AMITAY IS A DAPPER MAN with a ready smile and a self-deprecatory
manner. He works out of a small corner office on North Capitol Street
in a building that houses lobbyists from three dozen state governments,
assorted defense contractors and the American Gas Association, all of
them seeking to spread knowledge and enlightenment among members of
Congress and their staffs. Amitay, who operates a small lobbying law
firm, blends right in. Yet even among his peers his success is
something of a legend.
Educated at Columbia and Harvard Law, Amitay had spent seven years as a
diplomat in the State Department and six more as a legislative aide on
the Hill when friends approached him in 1974 about becoming executive
director of AIPAC. The organization was founded in the early 1950s by a
Canadian-born former journalist named I.L. Kenen with funding from
various Jewish groups. Kenen was a tireless advocate for Israel in the
1950s and early '60s, when it had to claw for dollars and votes against
a powerful and determined lobby of oil interests, Arab-oriented
diplomats and lawmakers such as J. William Fulbright, the legendary
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who saw U.S.
support of the fledgling Jewish state as a serious mistake that
threatened regional stability.
The 1967 Six-Day War marked a turning point. Arab leaders talked
confidently of driving the Jews into the sea, igniting fears of a new
Holocaust, but Israel launched preemptive airstrikes on Egypt and Syria
and won a smashing victory. Many American Jews rallied around their
scrappy Middle Eastern cousin, as did non-Jews who saw Israel as a
powerful little island of democracy in a sea of hostile Arab
dictatorships.
Initially, Amitay was reluctant to take over an organization purporting
to represent the forever bickering factions of organized American
Jewry. "It was like herding cats," he recalls. "I took the job against
my better judgment."
He eventually tripled AIPAC's staff size and budget, but his most
strategic decision was to move the office from 13th and G, four blocks
from the White House, to the foot of Capitol Hill. Amitay saw the State
Department and the rest of the executive branch as hostile territory
for Israel and Congress as a natural ally. For one thing, he could do
the math: There were only two elected officials in the executive branch
-- the president and vice president -- but 535 in Congress. Lots more
targets and opportunities for persuasion.
Amitay had a couple of things going for him: his own experience and
relationships on the Hill; a small but hard-working staff, which at one
time included CNN's Wolf Blitzer; and Kenneth Wollack, president of the
National Democratic Institute. But his biggest asset was several
thousand affluent grass-roots members for whom Israel was not just a
cause but a sacred mission. "The big reason why AIPAC is so effective
is the enthusiasm of our people, and that's because of their affinity
for Israel, the knowledge they have and the willingness to get involved
politically, write a letter, send an e-mail, send a contribution and
get to know their members of Congress," Amitay says.
AIPAC is the best-known of a handful of groups that have made support
for Israel a centerpiece of their agendas, including the American
Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation
League and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations. But when it comes to Washington, AIPAC wields the real
clout.
In its early days, Israel was almost exclusively the foster child of
liberal Democrats, the affiliation of most American Jews. That began to
change in the late 1970s after Menachem Begin became the country's
first right-of-center prime minister. He forged a practical alliance
with the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other Christian conservatives who saw
Jewish rule over the Holy Land as the divinely ordained prelude to the
Second Coming of Christ. The Reagan administration saw in Israel a
strategic Cold War ally, a balance against Soviet client-states such as
Syria and Iraq. Israelis relied on the political support and financial
donations that the American Jewish community provided. Still, they were
ambivalent and at times contemptuous of their more affluent brethren,
who were willing to give money but not willing to move to Israel or
send their children there. Ben-Gurion's stated goal had been to bring
Jews home from 2,000 years of exile. But the existence of Israel and
its pressing needs gave American Jews a rallying cry and sense of
cohesion that enhanced their political stature in American society. The
late Arthur Hertzberg, a rabbi, historian and president of the American
Jewish Congress, once told me that before Israel's existence Jews
attended White House dinners as individuals. Afterward, they came as
Jews. "In a real sense, being involved with Israel made Jewish leaders
more truly American than they had ever dreamt of being," he said.
For some American Jews, the passion for Israel was born partly out of
guilt: During World War II, the Jewish establishment, like the U.S.
government, had been slow to respond to reports that Jews were being
systematically slaughtered in Hitler's Europe. Many Jewish leaders
swore they would never let such a crime happen again. They rallied
around Israel, which had risen out of the ashes of the Holocaust, to
protect it -- and themselves.
And that's the interesting psychological part: While American Jews may
have become powerful, they don't feel powerful. A new set of pogroms or
a new Holocaust? It could happen, even in America. "There's a certain
dynamic to organized Jewish life as to all so-called defense
organizations created to protect a supposedly vulnerable group," says
Henry Siegman, who once served as executive director of the American
Jewish Congress and now directs the U.S./Middle East project at the
Council of Foreign Relations. "It creates a culture of victimhood, and
it often attracts people who feel like they're victims as well."
AMITAY QUIT AIPAC IN 1980 TO OPEN A LAW PRACTICE that lobbies for
defense contractors. But he didn't give up working for Israeli
interests, forming his own pro-Israel PAC, the Washington Public
Affairs Council. And AIPAC continued to grow under his successor,
Thomas Dine, who presided over a massive increase in the group's size
and influence during the 1980s, a decade in which the lobby claimed
some significant political scalps. Pro-Israel money helped defeat
Republican Reps. Paul Findley of Illinois and Pete McCloskey of
California and Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois, all of whom were deemed
too sympathetic to Arab causes and too critical of Israel.
Findley says he had always voted for aid to Israel even while
criticizing Israeli policy. But his real sin was meeting periodically
with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom he once praised as "a great
champion of human rights." Findley was targeted in the election of
1982: He had served 11 terms; he didn't get a 12th. Two years after
that, Percy lost to Paul Simon in a bitter contest in which supporters
of Israel poured an estimated $1.8 million into direct contributions
and an independent anti-Percy ad campaign. The message to incumbents
was clear: Oppose Israel at your peril.
"After that," says Findley, "I really feel the cloak of intimidation
was pretty secure."
Percy told colleagues he blamed Amitay personally for his defeat.
"Frankly, I didn't know I was that powerful," says Amitay. "We just did
what every lobbying group in this town does: It supports its friends
and tries to defeat its enemies. So I don't see what the big deal was."
Nevertheless, the Israel lobby, and AIPAC in particular, gained a
reputation as the National Rifle Association of foreign policy: a
hard-edged, pugnacious bunch that took names and kept score. But in
some ways it was even stronger. The NRA's support was largely confined
to right-wing Republicans and rural Democrats. But AIPAC made inroads
in both parties and both ends of the ideological spectrum.
Then one day it went too far.
THE YEAR WAS 1991, AND PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH WAS ON A ROLL. Having
defeated the Iraqi army and driven it out of Kuwait, Bush and his
wheeler-dealer secretary of state, James Baker, turned their attention
to the Arab-Israeli conflict. They were pushing both sides toward a
historic peace conference in Madrid, but first faced an issue that they
feared could torpedo the session before it started.
The prime minister of Israel was a hard-liner named Yitzhak Shamir, who
in pre-independence days was the gun-wielding leader of the smallest
and most extreme of militant Zionist factions. Faced with a wave of
Jewish immigrants from the collapsing Soviet Union, Shamir's government
was throwing up new housing as fast as possible. To ease the costs of
massive borrowing, it was seeking $10 billion in loan guarantees from
Washington. Bush and Baker wanted Shamir's pledge that he wouldn't use
the loan guarantees toward expanding controversial Jewish settlements
in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was a promise
Shamir didn't want to make. He instructed AIPAC to get the guarantees
through Congress over the administration's objections.
The crunch came one day that September when AIPAC dispatched more than
1,000 members to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress. Bush
retaliated at a news conference when he took direct aim at the Israel
lobby, saying he was "up against some powerful political forces . . . I
heard today there was something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill
working on the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little
guy down here doing it."
AIPAC's leaders had told Shamir they had enough votes to easily
override the president in both the House and Senate, but Bush's remarks
punctured their balloon like a blowtorch. Within days, leaders of both
houses advised AIPAC to back down. Its support had melted away.
But what shocked Shamir even more was the rapid defection of his
American Jewish allies. They didn't like being portrayed by the
president as a shadowy but powerful force serving the interests of a
foreign power. "It clobbered the Jewish community, left us in a state
of shock," one American Jewish leader told me later.
Shamir and his aides derided American Jews as timid, even gutless. But
Israeli voters blamed him for overplaying his hand. The following year
he lost his bid for reelection to the more dovish Yitzhak Rabin. Bush
paid a price as well. He got crushed in a small group of heavily Jewish
precincts in states such as New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Florida in
his November 1992 election loss to Bill Clinton.
When Rabin came to Washington for the first time as prime minister, he
summoned AIPAC's leaders to a closed-door meeting at the Madison Hotel
in which he accused them of steering Israel into a needless
confrontation with the White House. From now on, he told them, Israel
would drive its own relations with Washington, and AIPAC would be
consigned to a back seat.
The organization's leaders learned an important lesson. "After that
they adopted the Colin Powell doctrine," says Ori Nir, a veteran
journalist for the Jewish Forward. "They only fought the battles that
they knew they could win."
"WELCOME TO THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE," DECLARES JOSH BLOCK, director of
media affairs, rolling his eyes as he ushers me into AIPAC's bustling
and disheveled headquarters on First Street NW.
There's nothing very imperial about Block, a cheerful thirtysomething
veteran of Democratic Party election campaigns whose wife has just
given birth to their first child. Nor about his office, whose window
overlooks the Washington Monument -- but also a parking lot dominated
by a refuse container crammed with discarded sofas outside the D.C.
Central Kitchen, a feeding center for the homeless.
The place is a typical Washington-style lobbying and public affairs
shop, a warren of small offices and windowless conference rooms spread
over two floors, with photocopiers, industrial-type metal bookshelves,
sagging gray sofas, institutional brown carpet and drab yellow walls.
The air-conditioning system seems less than robust on a steamy June
afternoon. AIPAC has plans to move to a slightly grander building up
the street next year.
A delegation of Japanese businessmen once took a tour, says Block, and
at the end one of them turned to his guide with a polite smile and
asked, "Okay, could you now show us where the real headquarters are?"
There's nothing to hide. AIPAC's size, strength and agenda are all
public information, much of it displayed on its Web site: the staff of
200 lobbyists, researchers and organizers; the $47 million annual
budget; the 100,000 grass-roots members, almost double the number of
five years ago; and the recruitment drive on 300 college campuses.
AIPAC in recent years has parted with some of the staff members who
gave it a harder edge, foremost among them Steve Rosen, its former
director of foreign policy issues. Rosen and a fellow staff member,
Keith Weissman, were fired last year after they were indicted under the
1917 Espionage Act for allegedly receiving classified information about
administration strategy on Iran from Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon's
Iran desk officer. Their trial is scheduled for later this summer.
Lawyers for Rosen and Weissman contend their clients did only what
journalists and analysts do every day in Washington -- gather
information. Maybe so, but what's really intriguing for our purposes is
how this little scandal came about. It wasn't Rosen and Weissman
pursuing Franklin; it was Franklin seeking them out to make an end run
around his superiors, who didn't share Franklin's view that the White
House should crack down harder on Iran's developing nuclear program.
Franklin believed enlisting AIPAC's help was the best way to ensure
that his message got delivered to the White House.
These days AIPAC's staff is a mix of hired guns and true believers
known for their expertise. Take Brad Gordon, co-director of policy and
government affairs. Gordon, among other things a former congressional
aide and CIA analyst, is a compact man with a clipped mustache, graying
hair and a r=E9sum=E9 longer than the menu at the Bombay Club, where we
meet for lunch. At AIPAC he's in charge of overseeing all legislation.
He appears to be careful, modest, self-confident and authoritative
about the system and his role. "We have a fairly sophisticated
understanding of what's doable and what's not," he tells me. "And we
work in the world of the doable."
For overstretched members of Congress and their staffs, who don't have
the time or resources to master every subject in their domain, AIPAC
makes itself an essential tool. It briefs. It lobbies. It organizes
frequent seminars on subjects such as terrorism, Islamic militarism and
nuclear proliferation. It brings experts to the Hill from think tanks
in Washington and Tel Aviv. It provides research papers and offers
advice on drafting legislation on foreign affairs, including the annual
foreign aid bill. And behind it is a vast network of grass-roots
activists in each House district who make a point of visiting
individual members of Congress, inviting them to social events and
contributing to their reelection campaigns.
Money is an important part of the equation. AIPAC is not a political
action committee, and the organization itself doesn't give a dime in
campaign contributions. But its Web site, which details how members of
Congress voted on AIPAC's key issues, and the AIPAC Insider, a glossy
periodical that handicaps close political races, are scrutinized by
thousands of potential donors. Pro-Israel interests have contributed
$56.8 million in individual, group and soft money donations to federal
candidates and party committees since 1990, according to the
nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. (By contrast, the center
says, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim groups donated $297,000 during the same
period.) Between the 2000 and the 2004 elections, the 50 members of
AIPAC's board donated an average of $72,000 each to campaigns and
political action committees. One in every five board members was a top
fundraiser for President Bush or John Kerry.
AIPAC's members often overlap with those of other pro-Israel
organizations, some of which are renowned for playing hardball. In
2002, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched Operation Defensive
Shield, a military campaign that laid siege to cities in the West Bank
to counter a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli
civilians. Pro-Israel activists here organized letter-writing
campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts against media organizations for
purportedly distorted reporting of Palestinian casualties. One group,
the Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America,
demonstrated outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities and
cost WBUR in Boston more than $1 million in contributions.
AIPAC organizes annual trips to Israel where dozens of members of
Congress and their staffs often get their first taste of the Holy Land.
Rep. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican who is House majority whip, has
taken four AIPAC-sponsored trips to Israel over the years. "The bonding
that happens, the understanding of the importance of democracy, the
understanding of this miracle in Israel . . . is an incredible thing to
watch," he told the organization's annual conference.
The entire AIPAC package has impressed other ethnic groups. Most
recently, Indian Americans have sought to forge a network of
organizations, think tanks and PACs patterned after the American Jewish
model. Lewis Roth of Americans for Peace Now, a left-of-center lobbying
group, says, "AIPAC has a trifecta of power on the Hill -- direct
lobbying, tremendous grass-roots support and money from contributors
who look to them for guidance."
It also helps to have the right enemies.
BRAD GORDON RECALLS WALKING THROUGH THE CORRIDORS OF CAPITOL HILL in
the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. "More than one member came
up to me and said, 'You know, Brad, I always understood intellectually
what you were talking about, but now I really get it.'"
Since 9/11, Americans have increasingly come to accept the idea that
Israel and the United States share not just values but enemies. A
Gallup Poll in February reported 68 percent of Americans have a
favorable opinion of Israel with 23 percent unfavorable, and that
Americans support Israelis over Palestinians by 59 percent to 15
percent.
Recent electoral victories by Islamic radicals in Iran and the
Palestinian territories have only heightened the sense of us vs. them.
With his sweeping condemnations and threats against the United States
and Israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's radical new president, has
quickly joined the pantheon of bad guys, alongside Osama bin Laden and
Saddam Hussein. "Ahmadinejad is worth every penny," says Morris Amitay.
"He says amazing things, and the scary part is he really means it."
This year, AIPAC's two-pronged legislative agenda focuses on these
enemies. The first is the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, a bill
placing tough new restrictions on aid to the Palestinian Authority
since the electoral victory of the militant Islamic group Hamas. Its
charter calls for Israel's destruction, and its operatives are
responsible for many of the suicide bombings of Israeli civilian
targets. Then there is the Iran Freedom Support Act, designed to dry up
foreign funds Iran can use to develop a nuclear bomb and to supply aid
to anti-government groups there. No one at AIPAC, Gordon insists, is
pressing for military action against Iran. Their goal is a strong
diplomatic and economic response coordinated among the United States,
its European allies, Russia and China.
Nonetheless, not everyone supports AIPAC's approach. The Conference of
Catholic Bishops and several other charitable groups opposed the
House-sponsored version of the Hamas bill, as did three liberal
pro-Israel groups -- Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum
and the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace. Opponents argued that
the bill would isolate and punish Palestinian moderates and restrict
the delivery of humanitarian aid. The Bush administration issued
talking points contending that the bill would tie its hands and that,
in any case, it already had all the power it needed to restrict aid
that might be channeled to Hamas.
At its annual conference in March, AIPAC dispatched hundreds of
activists to more than 450 congressional offices to lobby for the
measure. One of those targeted was Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota
Democrat with a solid pro-Israel voting record who had opposed the bill
in committee, citing the Catholic bishops' concerns. McCollum took
offense after an AIPAC representative from Minneapolis confronted Bill
Harper, her chief of staff, over her vote. Harper said the AIPAC rep
told him that "McCollum's support for terrorists would not be
tolerated."
"Never has my name and reputation been maligned or smeared as it was
last week by a representative of AIPAC," McCollum complained in a
letter to Howard Kohr, AIPAC's executive director. She called the
remarks "hateful, vile and offensive," demanded that Kohr apologize and
banned AIPAC representatives from her office until he did.
Kohr requested a meeting to talk it over. The AIPAC rep denied making
the remarks. No one apologized, but McCollum eventually declared the
incident over.
The bill passed the House, on the day before Olmert addressed Congress,
by 361 to 37. A milder version of the bill unanimously passed the
Senate late last month.
Like Congress, the Bush administration has also been an easy sell. Ever
since George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, took a helicopter ride
over the Israeli countryside with Sharon, Bush has felt a sense of
kinship and concern. When Ambassador Ayalon phones the White House, he
deals with Elliott Abrams, a longtime supporter of Israel who is deputy
national security adviser. Ayalon, who used to be Sharon's foreign
affairs adviser, has been to dinner at Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's home and is on a first-name basis with National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley, presidential political strategist Karl Rove and the new
White House chief of staff, Josh Bolten. Both sides say relations have
never been closer.
There was a glitch in 2002 when Bush declared "enough is enough" and
demanded that Sharon pull back Israeli forces from their siege of the
West Bank, dispatching Colin Powell, then secretary of state, to
negotiate a withdrawal. AIPAC helped organize congressional resolutions
reaffirming solidarity with Israel that passed the Senate by 94 to 2
and the House by 352 to 21. Supporters organized a "Stand Up for
Israel" rally in Washington in April that drew tens of thousands. The
crowd booed senior Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's
representative to the rally, when he told them "innocent Palestinians
are suffering and dying in great numbers." And they cheered Janet
Parshall, host of an evangelical Christian talk show, who declared: "We
will never limp, we will never wimp, we will never vacillate in our
support of Israel."
Bush stopped making his plea for withdrawal, and four days after the
rally hailed Sharon as a "man of peace." Powell came home empty-handed.
Some people are not happy about the close ties between the Israel lobby
and the most conservative president since Ronald Reagan. They complain
that AIPAC and its sister groups have moved too far to the right and
grown overly cozy with former House majority leader Tom DeLay and a
Republican leadership now mired in scandal epitomized by convicted
lobbyist Jack Abramoff, once a big donor to Jewish causes. These
groups, it is said, have lost touch with a majority of American Jews,
who still skew liberal, vote Democratic and view Christian
conservatives with abiding suspicion.
But the real deal-breaker for many -- including a pair of respected
political scientists at two leading universities -- was the war in
Iraq.
STEPHEN WALT'S OFFICE IN THE KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT IS COZY AND
SEDATE, with a large desk and a set of sofas around a coffee table.
There's even a fireplace in one wall, all rust-colored bricks and
polished brass. Walt says he's never actually used it. Nowadays he
wouldn't need to -- the essay he co-authored with fellow political
scientist John Mearsheimer has created enough heat to keep the entire
building at a swelter.
Tall, rangy and soft-spoken, Walt's the kind of multidimensional
scholar who's as comfortable talking about the creative impulses of the
Beatles as he is about American foreign policy. He's a man of
gold-plated academic credentials: PhD in political science from the
University of California at Berkeley, teaching positions at Princeton
University and the University of Chicago before joining the Kennedy
School at Harvard as professor in international relations and academic
dean. He and Mearsheimer, who were fellow academics at Chicago, are
leading members of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a
Washington-based group of academics and former policymakers who believe
the Bush administration's primary achievement has been to convince
friend and foe alike that untrammeled American power poses one of the
greatest threats to world peace and stability.
In the prelude to the invasion of Iraq, Walt and Mearsheimer published
an article in Foreign Policy magazine in January 2003, titled "An
Unnecessary War." It concluded that Iraqi leader Hussein was weak and
eminently deterrable without resorting to force. They also organized a
full-page ad in the New York Times in which they and 31 other scholars
declared the impending conflict "a profound and costly mistake."
We went to war anyway, and many of Walt and Mearsheimer's most dire
predictions came to pass. No one in government had listened to them. So
what went wrong?
In previous works Walt had written about the role of ethnic lobbies in
the making of foreign policy. His view: They tend to gum up the works.
Israel and its lobby, he and Mearsheimer conclude, was the main factor
that had sent American policy off the rails when it came to Iraq.
Their essay -- published in the London Review of Books and, in an
extended version, on the Kennedy School's Web site -- thoroughly
condemns the U.S.-Israel relationship. Since the Cold War ended, they
contend, Israel has become a strategic liability that ignites terrorism
against the West and serves as a rallying cry and recruitment poster
for bin Laden and al-Qaeda. What's more, there's no particular moral
reason for the United States to support Israel. Despite a
well-cultivated myth, Israel has always been stronger militarily than
neighboring Arab states, racist and discriminatory in treating its own
non-Jewish citizens and brutal when it comes to the Palestinians. "The
creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian
people," the essay states baldly.
As for the United States, it is the "de facto enabler of Israeli
expansion in the occupied territories, making it complicit in the
crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians."
Why does Israel enjoy such uncritical American support? The lobby, say
Walt and Mearsheimer. Nothing conspiratorial or improper, mind you.
"For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise the Lobby
are doing what other special interest groups do, just much better."
The lobby, according to Walt and Mearsheimer, has a free run in
Congress. The media also play a role because they generally demur from
criticizing Israeli policy. But the essay saves its hardest shot for
the neoconservatives -- that group of pro-Israel ideologues, many of
them Jewish, who steered the Bush administration toward the Iraq war.
The neocons sought to transform the Middle East by overthrowing Hussein
and spreading their brand of democracy to the region. They may have
mistakenly believed they were furthering U.S. interests, the essay
contends, but they were actually implementing an Israeli agenda. "Given
the neoconservatives' devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq,
and their influence in the Bush administration, it is not surprising
that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further
Israeli interest."
Listening to Walt, you get the sense that he believes there is one
correct and objective foreign policy that an enlightened elite would be
able to agree upon if only those grubby ethnic interest groups were not
out there playing politics. When I ask him about this, he denies
holding such an ivory tower view. For him it's a simple issue: "Absent
the pressure from the Israel lobby, I don't think we would have gone to
war with Iraq. We don't use the word 'hijack' because that's not the
way policy gets done. But it wouldn't have happened without that set of
institutions and individuals who had been pushing it for some time."
Still, he doesn't seem to allow for the possibility that foreign policy
in a pluralistic democracy is inevitably the product of a noisy clash
of interests, or that the success of Israel's supporters may stem from
the country's popularity here or from American revulsion over
Palestinian suicide bombings. Or for that matter that American
opposition to the prospect of Iran achieving a nuclear bomb has little
to do with Israel and more to do with American fears of ayatollahs with
nukes.
Iran may be worrisome, says Walt, but no more so than previous threats.
"My belief is we would not be contemplating preventive war if we did
not have a powerful domestic interest group pushing this issue. We have
lived with a number of really odious regimes having nuclear weapons,
because we understood that we could deter them effectively with the
weapons at our disposal."
When Walt and Mearsheimer published their essay, they were deluged with
hundreds of e-mails and phone calls. Walt says the reactions he's
received to the essay have been positive by a ratio of 4 to 1. Some
were unwelcome: White supremacist David Duke said the essay vindicated
his views, and other fringe commentators have invoked the paper to
justify their claims of an American Jewish conspiracy.
Walt strongly disavows these claims. "There's a long and despicable
historical tradition in the Christian West that when bad things happen,
you blame the Jews, and I understand why some Jewish Americans are very
sensitive on this point because I know it has a historical basis. We
did our best to make it clear that is not what we were saying, that we
were not accusing people of disloyalty or being part of any kind of
conspiracy, that we reject those sorts of arguments and find them
reprehensible.
"But I still believe that these are issues we have to be able to talk
about in a calm and serious way even when there are strong passions
involved. This was an issue that had been the elephant in the room for
a long time, and it needed to be discussed openly."
"OKAY, SO TWO JEWS ARE ABOUT TO BE SHOT BY A NAZI SS OFFICER, and he
asks if they have any final remarks. One Jew raises his hand to speak,
but the other one says to him, 'Stop it -- aren't we in enough trouble
already?' Well I'm not afraid of raising my hand."
The man raising his hand is Michael Oren, an American-born Israeli
historian. He moved from New Jersey to Jerusalem in the late 1970s,
served in the Israeli army, got his PhD from Hebrew University. He has
written a bestseller, Six Days of War, is completing a history of U.S.
engagement with the Holy Land and is spending the semester teaching at
Harvard and Yale. He was also one of the first to condemn the Israel
lobby essay in a piece published in the New Republic. Across the table
at Bartley's, a Cambridge hamburger haven, is Shai Feldman, a
fifth-generation Israeli who was head of the Jaffee Center for
Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel's premier strategic
think tank, before taking over as director of the Crown Center for
Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Feldman has known Walt and
Mearsheimer for more than two decades -- Walt helped hold up the
ceremonial chuppah at Feldman's wedding -- and he has shied away from
publicly attacking the essay, even though he finds it misguided and
misinformed.
Oren's a bit to the right of center, and Feldman's a bit to the left,
but they're both snugly in the Israeli mainstream. Which means they
love to argue.
Feldman says he speaks more out of sorrow than anger about where his
two friends may have gone wrong in their essay.
"Look, Israel didn't mobilize anybody over Iraq, and associating Israel
with the neocons on this issue is preposterous," he says, helping
himself to a french fry. "Israel didn't see Iraq as a danger, and,
what's more, it had no interest in pushing the Bush administration's
democracy agenda." The only prominent Israeli to champion that idea,
says Feldman, is former cabinet minister Natan Sharansky, author of The
Case for Democracy , a book that President Bush read and honored by
inviting Sharansky to the White House to talk about it. But Sharansky's
a lone wolf, says Feldman. "Believe me, that book has more readers in
Washington than in Jerusalem."
So if Israel wasn't pushing directly for an invasion of Iraq, what
about its American lobbyists?
AIPAC took no official position on the merits of going to war in Iraq,
and staff members insist they did not lobby in favor of the 2002 war
resolution. But, like the Israeli government, once it was clear that
the Bush administration was determined to go to war, AIPAC cheered from
the sidelines, bestowing sustained ovations on an array of
administration officials at its April 2003 annual conference and on
Bush himself when he attended the following year.
Oren, who has studied the subject for years, believes the animosity
toward the Israel lobby goes deeper than policy. He even raises the
possibility that Walt and Mearsheimer are anti-Semites.
"You have to differentiate between them and their argument," Feldman
replies. "They're not anti-Semites even if they have slid into an
anti-Semitic argument. I think it all comes from their failure to
prevent the war on Iraq."
Oren: "So they come up with this truly unique notion of blaming the
Jews!"
Oren sees the essay as an evil that needs to be condemned. But Feldman
argues that "the ties between Israel and the United States are so
robust this essay won't damage them. And to make into martyrs a couple
of academics with a lousy paper would only prove their point."
What becomes clear after a while is that the differences between
Feldman and Oren aren't between left and right, but between a longtime
Israeli and a newcomer. "In the '50s when Israel was precarious, things
might have looked different," says Feldman. "But today Israel is
strong, and people can ask questions that are considered heretical
here. To portray Israel as a leaf hanging in the wind is almost to say
it has not succeeded."
Oren on the other hand is a first-generation immigrant who used to get
chased home from school in West Orange, N.J., because he was Jewish.
His Israel is more
slender and endangered and needs to be constantly vigilant, despite
having one of the world's strongest armies.
"All these tanks and planes -- you couldn't use them against suicide
bombers," says Oren. "Even now the president of Iran talks about wiping
Israel off the map. We're still vulnerable."
SOME OF THE ANGRIEST RESPONSES TO WALT AND MEARSHEIMER COME FROM
AMERICAN JEWS who are singled out in the essay as members of the lobby.
Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official and neoconservative thinker
who was a strong advocate for the Iraq war, says he's furious that the
essay suggests he supported the war because it helped Israel's
interests rather than those of the United States.
Then there is Dennis Ross, chief Middle East peace negotiator in the
George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, an American Jew who is
deeply committed to Israel's survival yet also believes in the
legitimacy of a Palestinian state. Ross was the point man for the
ill-fated Camp David peace summit in July 2000, in which Clinton failed
to achieve a breakthrough with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and
Palestinian leader Arafat. These days he's counselor and distinguished
fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, one of the
think tanks Walt and Mearsheimer describe as part of the Israel lobby.
Echoing Feldman and Oren, Ross insists that the essay is wrong to claim
Israel had pushed for war in Iraq. If anything, the Israelis feared
such a war would divert attention and resources from the Middle East's
real danger -- Iran. Some Israelis even warned that toppling Hussein
would lead to chaos in Iraq that would make the neighboring Iranians
stronger. Which is, more or less, what has happened.
"It might have been better if they had gotten their facts straight,"
says Ross of Walt and Mearsheimer. "I don't say they're anti-Semitic,
just that they're ignorant."
But it's more than that. Ross devoted a large chunk of his career to
trying to broker peace in the Middle East. He doesn't like being
branded as part of anyone's lobby and resents being lumped together
with neocons like Feith, a longtime critic. "I would be dishonest if I
said it didn't make me angry," Ross says. "It's so fallacious, and it
will be used by those who want to say that American policy is somehow
distorted and perverted."
IT'S A TUESDAY IN EARLY MARCH, and there are 5,000 people jammed at
dining tables in the Washington Convention Center for AIPAC's annual
gathering, including more than 50 senators and 100 House members and
dozens of administration officials. Vice President Cheney gives a
keynote address, as does John Bolton, the administration's
fire-breathing ambassador to the United Nations. The Israeli election
is coming up in a few days, and the leaders of the three major parties
all appear via satellite hookup, including Ehud Olmert, who begins with
a politician's prayer of thanksgiving: "Thank God we have you; thank
God we have AIPAC."
The opening video montage begins with Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza
Strip; then shows angry crowds of Palestinians burning and looting the
abandoned settlements; then the electoral triumph of the radical
Islamist group Hamas; then mayhem in Iraq; images of bin Laden; a
parade of terror bombings in London, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and,
finally, Israel; then a reference to the stroke that felled prime
minister Sharon; then the harangue of Iranian President Ahmadinejad,
who cries that "Israel must be wiped off the map!" Violence, flames,
angry dark-skinned young Muslims.
The message seems to be: A new Holocaust? It could happen.
DAVID BEN-GURION NEVER GOT TO SEE ROOSEVELT, but that didn't stop him
from pressing ahead with his lifelong mission. After he left the United
States in 1942, he returned to Palestine and oversaw the creation of
the Jewish state. He became its first prime minister in 1948.
Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence at 6 p.m. Washington time on
May 14. Eleven minutes later, the United States became the first nation
to recognize the new state.
Ben-Gurion oversaw the building of Israel's powerful defense
establishment, mixed economy and quarrelsome political system. But, for
all his achievements, he suggested one simple way to measure a
country's success that might be instructive to Walt and Mearsheimer, as
well as to their critics. "The test of democracy," he wrote, "is
freedom of criticism."
Or, as Morris Amitay put it when our interview ended: "It's been nice
talking to you, and I look forward to sending a very critical letter to
the editor after your article appears."
.
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| User: "BernardZ" |
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| Title: Re: Washington Post confirms Israel lobby's power |
16 Jul 2006 06:50:37 AM |
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In article <1153044601.735891.61690@35g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
vesuvian.doppelgange@lycos.com says...
Now let's fast-forward 64 years to late May and a news conference in
the East Room of the White House. That tall, freckled, slightly
nervous-looking man with the rust-colored hair standing alongside
President Bush at matching lecterns is Ehud Olmert, 12th prime minister
of Israel. The two leaders and their advisers have just spent two hours
together in the Oval Office. Bush is reaffirming the "deep and abiding
ties between Israel and the United States" and praising Olmert's "bold
ideas" and commitment to peace. Afterward, they'll adjourn for a
private session without aides or note-takers and then go to dinner
together. And the next day Olmert will address a joint session of
Congress, whose members will interrupt his speech with 16 standing
ovations. Ben-Gurion, whose remains rest in a simple grave overlooking
the Negev Desert, would be stunned.
It's not that Olmert is a more commanding figure than Ben-Gurion. Far
from it. No, it's about power. And not just Israeli power. It's really
about the perceived power of the Israel lobby,
So based on the number of people that Bush sees, there are must be much
many more powerful lobbies then the Israeli lobby. Probably millions
more.
--
It is best to travel the path of life with some one else but its nice to
go alone for a short time.
Observations of Bernard - No 101
.
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| User: "Geno1234" |
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| Title: Re: Washington Post confirms Israel lobby's power |
16 Jul 2006 10:17:46 AM |
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Now that may be. But doesn't change the fact that they are Jews,
The Pig Trought attracts these jew pigs.
"BernardZ" <DontBother@NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1f24d31b23cfcbb59898d0@west.Usenet-News.net...
In article <1153044601.735891.61690@35g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
vesuvian.doppelgange@lycos.com says...
Now let's fast-forward 64 years to late May and a news conference in
the East Room of the White House. That tall, freckled, slightly
nervous-looking man with the rust-colored hair standing alongside
President Bush at matching lecterns is Ehud Olmert, 12th prime minister
of Israel. The two leaders and their advisers have just spent two hours
together in the Oval Office. Bush is reaffirming the "deep and abiding
ties between Israel and the United States" and praising Olmert's "bold
ideas" and commitment to peace. Afterward, they'll adjourn for a
private session without aides or note-takers and then go to dinner
together. And the next day Olmert will address a joint session of
Congress, whose members will interrupt his speech with 16 standing
ovations. Ben-Gurion, whose remains rest in a simple grave overlooking
the Negev Desert, would be stunned.
It's not that Olmert is a more commanding figure than Ben-Gurion. Far
from it. No, it's about power. And not just Israeli power. It's really
about the perceived power of the Israel lobby,
So based on the number of people that Bush sees, there are must be much
many more powerful lobbies then the Israeli lobby. Probably millions
more.
--
It is best to travel the path of life with some one else but its nice to
go alone for a short time.
Observations of Bernard - No 101
.
|
|
|
| User: "BernardZ" |
|
| Title: Re: Washington Post confirms Israel lobby's power |
16 Jul 2006 12:09:32 PM |
|
|
In article <51b59$44ba589e$d8442a7d$11073@FUSE.NET>, francis1234
@fuse.net says...
Now that may be. But doesn't change the fact that they are Jews,
The Pig Trought attracts these jew pigs.
The pigs are people like you that deny other people what you accept as
your rights for very stupid racial reasons.
"BernardZ" <DontBother@NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1f24d31b23cfcbb59898d0@west.Usenet-News.net...
In article <1153044601.735891.61690@35g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
vesuvian.doppelgange@lycos.com says...
Now let's fast-forward 64 years to late May and a news conference in
the East Room of the White House. That tall, freckled, slightly
nervous-looking man with the rust-colored hair standing alongside
President Bush at matching lecterns is Ehud Olmert, 12th prime minister
of Israel. The two leaders and their advisers have just spent two hours
together in the Oval Office. Bush is reaffirming the "deep and abiding
ties between Israel and the United States" and praising Olmert's "bold
ideas" and commitment to peace. Afterward, they'll adjourn for a
private session without aides or note-takers and then go to dinner
together. And the next day Olmert will address a joint session of
Congress, whose members will interrupt his speech with 16 standing
ovations. Ben-Gurion, whose remains rest in a simple grave overlooking
the Negev Desert, would be stunned.
It's not that Olmert is a more commanding figure than Ben-Gurion. Far
from it. No, it's about power. And not just Israeli power. It's really
about the perceived power of the Israel lobby,
So based on the number of people that Bush sees, there are must be much
many more powerful lobbies then the Israeli lobby. Probably millions
more.
--
It is best to travel the path of life with some one else but its nice to
go alone for a short time.
Observations of Bernard - No 101
--
It is best to travel the path of life with some one else but its nice to
go alone for a short time.
Observations of Bernard - No 101
.
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