AIPAC’s Influence Continues to Wane

By Allan C. Brownfeld

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) long has been considered one of Washington’s most effective lobbying groups. On the surface, it may appear that its influence remains as strong as ever. At its annual Washington policy conference in March, 6,000 AIPAC members heard Vice President Dick Cheney warn that failure in Iraq would endanger Israel. Stressing that he stood before the crowd “as a strong supporter of Israel” and that “Israel has never had a better friend in the White House than George Bush,” Cheney’s address came at a time of swelling criticism of the Iraq war in the U.S. as a whole and from many quarters in the American Jewish community.

Cheney’s call on AIPAC to oppose withdrawal from Iraq overshadowed the meeting. Organizers had hoped the plenum would focus on the need for tough economic sanctions against Iran, without having the effort portrayed publicly as advocating military action against the regime in Tehran. But attempts to avoid such a perception suffered a blow when Congressional Quarterly reported on AIPAC’s role in blocking a House proposal that would have required the Bush administration to obtain congressional approval before taking military action against Iran.

Beneath the appearance of continuing power and influence, it is becoming increasingly clear that AIPAC does not in fact represent the views of the constituency in whose name it claims to speak, the American Jewish community. Rather than supporting AIPAC’s embrace of the war in Iraq, a recent Gallup Poll placed the American Jewish community at the top of the list of “major” religious groups opposed to the war. The Reform movement—the largest synagogue denomination in the U.S.—has gone on record in opposition to the war. According to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, his group’s resolution fairly reflects the Jewish community’s attitude toward the war. “It is not us that are out of step with American Jews,” he said.

AIPAC’s role is coming under increasing scrutiny, spurred in part by the debate initiated by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt in their in-depth 2006 study of the Israel lobby, which originally appeared in the London Review of Books (and was reprinted in the “Other Voices” supplement to the May/June 2006 Washington Report). Mearsheimer and Walt argued, among other things, that AIPAC had encouraged the U.S. to adopt policies that were neither in the American national interest nor in Israel’s long-term interest.

“It is suddenly becoming possible to ask hard questions about America’s relationship with Israel.”

Despite the widespread criticism which the two professors received from some in the organized Jewish community, the criticism and scrutiny of AIPAC’s role has increased dramatically in recent months.

Declared New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof: “There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.…Within Israel, you hear vitriolic debate in politics and the news media about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories. Yet no major American candidate is willing today to be half as critical of hard-line Israeli government policies as, say, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.”

One reason for such silence, Kristof wrote, “is that American politicians have learned to muzzle themselves. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential primaries Howard Dean said he favored an ‘even-handed role’ for the U.S.—and was blasted as being hostile to Israel. Likewise, Barack Obama has been scolded for daring to say: ‘Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.’ In contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton has safely refused to show an inch of daylight between herself and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.”

Writing in the April 12 New York Review of Books, George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and political activist, argued that the U.S. is doing Israel a disservice by allowing it to boycott the Hamas-Fatah Palestinian unity government and to turn down the Saudi Arabian peace initiative. But, he pointed out, there is no meaningful debate of such policies.

“While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of our policies toward Israel is very muted indeed,” Soros wrote. Pro-Israel activists, he added, have been “remarkably successful in suppressing criticism.”

Singling out AIPAC as a key source of the problem, Soros accused the lobby of pushing a hawkish agenda on Israeli-Palestinian issues. “AIPAC under its current leadership has clearly exceeded its mission,” he maintained, “and far from guaranteeing Israel’s existence, has endangered it.”

Noting that “I have a great deal of sympathy for my fellow Jews and a deep concern for the survival of Israel,” Soros declared that he “cannot remain silent now when the pro-Israel lobby is one of the last unexposed redoubts of this dogmatic way of thinking...I believe that a much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can’t make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties...I should like to emphasize that I do not subscribe to the myths propagated by enemies of Israel...Neither Israel’s policies nor the critics of those policies should be held responsible for anti-Semitism. At the same time, I do believe that attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel’s policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby’s success in suppressing divergent views.”

In its March 17 issue, The Economist of London devoted a full page to a discussion of the “changing climate” facing AIPAC: “The Iraq debacle has produced a fierce backlash against pro-war hawks, of which AIPAC was certainly one. It has also encouraged serious people to ask awkward questions about America’s alliance with Israel. And a growing number of people want to push against AIPAC.…AIPAC’s ace in the hole is the idea that it represents Jewish interests in a country that is generally philo-Semitic. But liberal Jewish groups retort that it represents only a sliver of Jewish opinion. A number of liberal groups have started to use their political muscle—groups such as the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Americans for Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum. These groups scored a significant victory over AIPAC by persuading Congress to water down a particularly uncompromising bit of legislation, the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which would have prevented any American contact with the Palestinian leadership...The growing activism of liberal Jewish groups underline a worrying fact for AIPAC: most Jews are fairly left-wing. Fully 77 percent of them think that the Iraq war was a mistake compared with 52 percent of all Americans...”

Beyond this, The Economist declared, “An even greater threat to AIPAC comes from the general climate of opinion. It is suddenly becoming possible for serious people—politicians and policymakers as well as academics—to ask hard questions about America’s relationship with Israel. Is America pursuing its own interests in the Middle East, or Israel’s? Should America tie itself so closely to the Israeli government’s policies or should it forge other alliances?...The biggest challenge facing AIPAC is how to deal with this changing climate. Its members have been admirably honest about their mission in life. They boast about passing more than a hundred bits of pro-Israel legislation a year. But they are too willing to close down debate with explosive charges of anti-Israel bias when people ask whether this is a good thing. America needs an open debate about its role in the Middle East—and AIPAC needs to take a positive role in that debate if it is to remain such a mighty force in American politics.”

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski worries that America is seen in the Middle East as “acting increasingly on behalf of Israel.” In his new book, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, he calls for “stricter lobbying laws” because groups such as AIPAC have too tight a hold on U.S. policy. It is Brzezinski’s view that AIPAC has seriously distorted U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Increasingly, more and more Jews feel alienated from Jewish organizations that supported both the Iraq war and Israel’s war in Lebanon. “The virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for Israel’s brutal actions...is not new but now no longer tolerable to me,” Sara Roy, a scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, writes in a new book, The War On Lebanon.

“The Moderate Jewish Left”

According to Dan Fleshler, an activist in the pro-Israel peace community, Middle East violence has helped awaken a large “universe” of liberal, politically active Jews. “Many of them are alienated from Israel and want nothing to do with it,” he says. “Maybe the most important thing to them is the Sierra Club. They’re cultural Jews, they’ve never been involved with Israel per se.” Their passivity has allowed right-wing Zionists who care more about the issue to affect policy, Fleshler explains, adding that the challenge to an alternative lobby is figuring out how to capture “the moderate Jewish left” on Israel issues.

This past March, while thousands of AIPAC delegates traveled to Capitol Hill to advocate for tough sanctions on Iran and no negotiations with the Palestinian Authority until it renounces terror and recognizes Israel, two other Jewish groups were urging the opposite.

Americans for Peace Now called on the Bush administration to change course and adopt a policy of “limited, constructive engagement” with Tehran. In a statement, the group recommended that the U.S. develop “a basket of meaningful diplomatic and economic carrots and sticks sufficient to persuade Iran to halt further development of its nuclear program.”

Another group, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, urged its supporters to call their senators and tell them not to sign a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sponsored by Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and John Ensign (R-NV), calling for “no direct aid and no contacts” with any members of the Palestinian Authority “that does not explicitly and unequivocally recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce terror and accept previous agreements.”

In an e-mail to supporters, Brit Tzedek declared: “At a time when the U.S. should be supporting forces of moderation among the Palestinians, this letter weakens those forces and demonstrates to the Palestinian people that moderation brings them nothing.”

M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum headlined a recent column “Pandering Not Required.” In it he called on presidential candidates instead to show their support for Israel by pledging: “If I am elected president, I will do everything in my power to bring about negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians with the goal of achieving peace and security for Israel and a secure state for the Palestinians.”

Explaining how far AIPAC’s positions are from the American Jewish mainstream, columnist Douglas Bloomfield wrote in the March 15 Washington Jewish Week that, “Most American Jews, like the rest of the country, oppose the Iraq war, but [Israeli Prime Minister] Olmert gave it a ringing endorsement in his live satellite hook-up to AIPAC..that could have been written by Dick Cheney...Olmert’s over-the-top embrace of the Bush policies is one more example of how the Israeli government is out of touch with the mainstream of American Jewry. His intervention in the most explosive issue before this nation is sure to give a lot of Israel’s friends in Washington serious heartburn.”

Bloomfield went on to point out that “Most Americans support a peace process leading to a two-state solution, and they see settlements as an obstacle to that goal—which is what backers intended. Settlements have never been popular among most American Jews (or Israelis these days), and Olmert’s recent decision to expand them did not sit well in the Jewish community. More damaging may be the perception of excessive Israeli government tolerance of settler violence against Palestinians, which reinforces the belief there is a double standard for justice in Israeli society. Most American Jews are uncomfortable with AIPAC’s and the Israeli government’s warm embrace of the religious right. AIPAC delegates...enthusiastically cheered a speech by evangelical Pastor John Hagee, who railed against territorial concessions to the Palestinians as ‘appeasement’ and ‘crocodile food.’ Most American Jews are progressives and uncomfortable with the alliance with evangelicals like Hagee; and don’t share his hard-line views about peace with the Palestinians and have less to agree about on domestic policy.”

Not only is AIPAC not representative of the constituency in whose name it professes to speak, but its former foreign policy chief, Steve Rosen, and its former Iran analyst, Keith Weissman, are now being prosecuted by the U.S. government for allegedly sharing classified U.S. information about Iran with Israeli diplomats, journalists and others. By any standard, AIPAC appears, more and more, to be a rogue organization speaking only for a narrow extremist constituency both in Israel and the U.S. As this reality becomes increasingly clear, its influence is likely to recede dramatically.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.