There is only one organization who understands better than the Republican party that it's votes more than deeds which create reality, and that is the America Israel Public Affairs Committee: better known as the second most controversial acronym in Washington: AIPAC.
Is AIPAC really as controversial as all that? All you have to know is that AIPAC's nickname in Washington is 'The Lobby."
What does AIPAC do? It does a lot of things, but above them all is one very simple strategy: get rid of the anti-Israel legislators, bring in pro-Israel legislators to replace them. When legislators vote against Israel, AIPAC promotes a candidate to run against them. AIPAC's candidate usually wins.
The most important thing people should realize about AIPAC is that they are exactly like every other facet of Jewish life: confusing. They are simultaneously much more powerful than they seem and nowhere near as powerful as they seem. The reason they're called 'the lobby' is not because they're bigger than every other lobby, it's because they're better than every other lobby - shrewd enough to make every dollar they spend work as well as ten from a bigger lobby. The US Chamber of Commerce spends 80 million every year on campaign contributions for big business. The National Association of Realtors spends roughly the same. The three biggest arms of Big Pharma each spend roughly 30 million. Amazon and Facebook both spend 15 million dollars each. The big four defense contractors each spend about 12 million. AIPAC? 3.5 million.
And yet, AIPAC's campaign funding is everywhere, and so obvious. AIPAC makes many, many more campaign contributions that seem to come from other, murkier (ok, shadier) sources: political action groups secretly affiliated to AIPAC that do not advertise their connection. But then again, so do all these other, larger lobbies. 'Dark money' is a simple fact of American public life, in which lobbies create separate organizations that seem to have no connection with their cause as a way of contributing more money to the candidate who favors their policy. There's nothing about what AIPAC does that larger lobbies don't do. It's one of the great disgraces of American public life, but when in Rome you fight as the Romans do or you (insert heavyhanded metaphor here).
Furthermore, the vast majority of AIPAC's campaign funding, official, murky, and unofficial, comes from a very obvious place unavailable to the Chamber of Commerce or Amazon: an army of small donors. Obviously, billionaires contribute their fair share, but AIPAC's success is because its followers really believe in its cause, and a small group of people with strong beliefs will always win against a large group of ambivalent fighters. AIPAC's small group of believers is not a few billionaires: it's hundred thousand official members, and something like 3 million Americans who donate by word of mouth - so basically, the American-Jewish community, the vast majority of whom believe that Israel is there for the Jewish people and believe that Israel is perpetually threatened. Whether or not that's true, if AIPAC wasn't there, their belief that their safety is threatened would only increase.
So how does AIPAC have a reputation for a monolithic influence on US foreign policy?
Before answering that, does AIPAC have that sort of influence? The answer is... sort of...When it comes to getting votes for pro-Israel candidates, AIPAC's success is extraordinary, but when it comes to actual policy, AIPAC has the same failures as any organization: if AIPAC had the level of influence that's attributed to it, it would have stopped Obama's "Iran Deal" before Obama could even propose it. It would have forced George HW Bush to guarantee a $10 billion loan to Israel in 1991 regardless of whether Israel continued to build settlements. It would have stopped George W. Bush in 2002 from putting together an anti-terror coalition of Arab countries that included many of Israel's sworn enemies. These are not the policies made with the approval of a lobby that has superhuman influence.
The reason it has that influence is because not only does AIPAC have an almost unrivaled donor base, but AIPAC knows how to stretch its dollars. AIPAC finds out potential candidates feelings on Israel before they're elected, and basically gives the sympathetic candidates what amounts to 'seed money' so that they can win first elections or close elections, the implication being obvious that if they vote against Israeli policy, they can do the same for other candidates. This process is a little intricate. AIPAC plays a much more delicate dance than the NRA does: the NRA has long since become advocates for only one party. Israel must exist through constant oscillations of public opinion: forty years ago, Israel still seemed the liberal alternative, a chance for liberals to score one for democracy and human rights against petrol authoritarians and corrupt oil men. The playing field was very different then, but gradually, there was a pendulum shift through which the Israeli cause became equated with Christianity, while the Arab cause became equated with anticolonialism. Through all this, AIPAC had to execute a labyrinthine series of political maneuvers on the most difficult political terrain to keep Israel in lawmakers' sympathies even as the sympathies of their voters were changing. The only way to do this was to plan for the future in such a manner that even if one party moved away from sympathy with Israel, their most powerful lawmakers would not.
Let's take what's perhaps the obvious example of how AIPAC succeeded: the peak of AIPAC's influence started in 1982 when they wanted to unseat a Republican congressman from Illinois named Paul Findlay who seemed inordinately passionate about the Palestinian cause. This was back in the now unimaginable days when Republicans were passionately pro-Arab because, in the pocket of Big Oil, they wanted policies that favored Big Oil's business partners. At the time, Gaza seemed dumped in Israel's lap by the Egyptians and it was considered a matter of debate whether there was even such a thing as a Palestinian people, so it was pretty much a given that Findlay was advocating for the Palestinians as just another front in Big Oil's PR war. So to face Findlay, AIPAC funded a little known lawyer named Dick Durban. In 2005, Durban became the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate and remained there ever since. So even the party weaker on Israel has members of the highest rank that have no special connection to Jews or Israel, but owe their entire careers to AIPAC.
Then, of course, there is the question of money.
Much is made of Israel's hefty foreign aid bill to the US: more than $3 billion every year. It's a lot of money, and it also isn't. Israel has Gross Domestic Product of almost $500 billion every year. So on the one hand, Israel seems like it doesn't need the money, and believe it or not, there are calls across the political spectrum to cut it in both countries - nearly as many on the right as on the left, so it probably won't last much longer. So why is it there? The answer is: it's a public endorsement, a statement of credibility on both sides Israel's favored nation status is not the reason Israel misbehaves, it's reason Israel doesn't misbehave a hundred times worse. So long as Israel exists publicly under the US's embrace it will act in the interests of a place like the US and not drop a host of WMD's on the Arab world - this is something the left has never understood. In this arrangement, the US gets the use of Israeli intelligence (of which General George J. Keegan said is 'worth more than five CIA's'), and Israel gets the confidence from American investors without parallel in any other country. The result? Look at Israel's list of scientific discoveries alongside its munitions spending.
Israel ranks #2 in innovation by the World Economic Forum and start up 1,000 tech companies every year! Israel has easily more startups per capita than anywhere in the world, the highest number of scientists, engineers and technicians as percentage of its population, 10 times as many scientific articles published percentage wise as its population percentage to the rest of the world population. It's thanks to Israel that the world has modern desert irrigation, the USB stick, micro-robotics for surgery, water desalination technologies, digital firewalls, geothermal powerplants, heart tissue made from algae, bird migration radar for planes, solar windows, the cherry tomato, baby monitors that measure breaths to help prevent crib death, electronic hair removal, steel security doors, Waze - the first GPS that gave us up-to-the-minute traffic and speed trap information.
If you really want to boycott Israel, you'll have to boycott all that.
Would all this have happened without that check? Can it continue without it? It's certainly possible, but you'll have to forgive some of us for not wanting to find out.
But then we have to ask the question: is AIPAC truly lobbying in the interests of Israel? Is it in Israel's interests to have so conspicuous an advocate in American discourse? Is it in Israel's interests to have an American lobby so loyal to Israel that it toes the absolute party line of its country? One can argue either way, but what's clear is that it has its deleterious effects.
When the Iraq War happened, AIPAC was immediately connected with the push for deposing Saddam. It seems circumstantially plausible: Saddam after all did launch chemical weapons on Tel Aviv in 1991, and in 1981 Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility in the town of Osirak where it was widely assumed that Saddam Hussein ordered the construction of an atomic bomb.
But if Israeli intelligence is half so good as its reputation, they surely knew that the Saddam regime was extremely weak by 2003, and, let's face it, AIPAC would have known too. Furthermore, I once read a story in a reputable news source that Prime Minister Sharon advised President Bush against the Iraqi invasion - but I can't find it anymore so who even knows if what I read was a false flag... More importantly, the only evidence of AIPAC's involvement lobbying for the Iraq War was when Congressman Jim Moran implicated the entire Jewish community in the push for it: saying that "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should." - more on sentiments like that in a moment...
When a lobby has as much scrutiny as AIPAC, then surely journalists could turn up more evidence for something as enormous as lobbying for the Iraq War, but no journalist did. AIPAC may wield incredible power in Washington, but with great power comes great exposure, and surely no lobby can work in the shadows to that extent... Can they?
But the question of whether AIPAC's disproportionate power is helpful erupted in 2006 when two of the most famous academics in geopolitical science, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, leveled an accusation in print that an 'Israel lobby' basically dictates American foreign policy. Mearsheimer and Walt are ultra-realists ('offensive realism' is the technical term), and from a basically right-wing orientation, they came to conclusions very much like the left wing. Their concern in the Middle East was not the human rights of Arabs, but rather, that American power depends on Middle Eastern oil, and the United States's support of Israel is directly contradictory to our state interests.
But Mearsheimer and Walt did not stop at accusing AIPAC, they accused everyone from the New York Times to the Christian Coalition of being a 'loose coalition' to promote Israel's interests over the United States. They also admitted that "the boundaries of the Israel lobby cannot be identified precisely."
So let's call this what it is. Mearsheimer and Walt not only implicated AIPAC supporters in this lobby organizations, they not only implicated organizations so ideologically diverse that the orgs can't even speak to each other without mistrust, Mearsheimer and Walt alleged that this enormous lobby of extremely disparate elements is invisible to the layman. Basically, they leveled against pro-Israel Americans an accusation beyond a conspiracy: they accused pro-Israel Americans of a cabal. Hopefully, I don't have to remind you that such accusations have very old and dangerous precedents.
Whether the power that AIPAC wields is truly as large as it seems, AIPAC is so powerful that two of the top academics in America leveled an accusation that the levers of power extend well beyond AIPAC to what seems like half the major institutions in America. What's remarkable about that is that their point seemed plausible to thousands of readers, and millions take it ever more seriously today. An effective lobby is far less visible than this.
AIPAC is that usual Washington mixture of morality and immorality. If AIPAC were truly a right wing or pro-war organization, they'd have opposed the peace process in the 90s, but they were staunchly in its favor. On the other hand, AIPAC's beginnings could not possibly be more immoral: for its first twenty years AIPAC was quite small by modern standards, but it was founded in 1953 after an Israeli massacre in a Palestinian town of 69 people, at least two thirds of them women and children, a massacre lead by none other than Ariel Sharon. The Eisenhower administration suspected that AIPAC was none other than the Israeli government in disguise, and it's fruitless to pretend that the Israeli government is not intimately involved with AIPAC. On the other hand again, in the 80s AIPAC was responsible for Senator and liberal lion Paul Simon (different Paul Simon) killing a bill that would have sold military planes to Saudi Arabia - planes that Saudi Arabia was more likely to use against Iran than Israel, and even in the 80s, Iran was a deadlier enemy to Israel than Saudi Arabia.
The problem with AIPAC is not necessarily that AIPAC exists, but that it exists at the expense of other Jewish points of view. When a pro-peace Jewish lobby began, J-Street, AIPAC immediately moved to crowd J-Street out of any influence. To AIPAC, the move may have been cravenly political, but to the lay Jewish public, the issue was a moral question. To millions of Jews, J-Street had the chutzpah to suggest that Israel might be pursuing policies contradictory to its interests, and is therefore a danger to Israel. But as a result of crowding J-Street out of widespread support while supporting ever more right-wing Israeli governments, AIPAC signaled to a new generation that there is no such thing as simultaneously being pro-Israel while simultaneously backing progressive causes. As a result, millions of people whose sympathies would have landed with J-Street now support 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and 'IfNotNow' - anti-Zionist organizations committed to Israel becoming a binational state, with no concern ever stated for the inevitable, and far bloodier than now, civil war that would ensue between Israelis and Palestinians... that's the nicest way I can phrase what JVP stands for.
AIPAC is a fact of Washington, not a good or bad fact, just a fact, and it's not going away any time soon. But if AIPAC continues to support Israel through good and ill, it will alienate entire generations of Americans away from Israel, and perhaps it already has. Liberals who care about Israel need a pro-peace alternative - not only for moral considerations, but for the practical considerations that AIPAC willfully refuses to consider. Whether there is or not a partner in peace, Israel's continued success requires the pursuit of a partner, and if AIPAC refuses to push Israel to find one, then another counterlobby must arise who pursues those Israeli interests at which AIPAC fails.
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