[WCUSP] The Other Israel Lobby

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

A friend sent me this. Not sure where he got it from.


A new alliance,  including financier George Soros and former Bill Clinton 
advisor Jeremy  Ben-Ami, aims to take on the powerful lobbyist group AIPAC — and 
reshape U.S.  policy.
 
The Other  Israel Lobby
 
By Gregory Levey
 
This past June, on my last day  working as a speechwriter for the Israeli 
government — first at the United  Nations and then in the prime minister’s 
office — I met with Prime Minister  Ehud Olmert in his private office at the 
Israeli parliament to discuss a  speech he had just given to the U.S. Congress. The 
speech, which I helped  write, was largely about the future of U.S.-Israeli 
relations, and we  discussed how it had gone over. Also at the meeting was a 
high-ranking  official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and when we left the 
building  together, he told me that the next day officials from the American 
Israel  Public Affairs Committee, the powerful lobbying group, would be visiting. 
He  asked if I had any suggestions about what to tell them about how they could 
 more effectively help Israel in Washington.
 
“Some people would say that maybe  the best thing would be for them not to be 
so reflexively pro-Israel on every  issue,” I said.
 
He laughed. “Well, I don’t think  that’s going to happen anytime soon,” he 
said. I suggested that such a  rebalancing might be beneficial for all who 
were interested in supporting  Israel, and he conceded that, yes, “just maybe” 
it would.
 
Many American Jews, it seems, have  similar feelings. Eighty-seven percent of 
them voted  Democratic in the recent midterms — the highest number since 1994 
— belying  the oft-repeated claim that the Bush administration’s staunch 
support for  Israel would move the traditionally Democratic Jewish vote toward 
the  Republicans. The fact is that most American Jews, and many other American  
supporters of Israel, do not see eye-to-eye on the Israeli-Palestinian  
conflict with the most hawkish, knee-jerk Israel supporters in the U.S.  government —
 even if their presumed leadership, represented by AIPAC, often  appears to 
do so. Moreover, AIPAC’s influence in Washington may soon begin to  decline, as 
a powerful new alliance of left-leaning friends of Israel has  begun to 
emerge, with the express aim of reshaping U.S. strategy on the  region’s most 
intractable problem.
 
If the Bush administration decides  to seriously reevaluate its strategy in 
the Middle East in the wake of the  Iraq Study Group’s recent report — and 
among its recommendations is  prioritizing a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict — it will have to  deal with a minefield of interest groups. That 
will surely include AIPAC, a  juggernaut that the New York Times has called the “
most important organization  affecting America’s relationship with Israel.”
 
In “The Israel Lobby,” their  highly controversial article earlier this 
year, Stephen Walt and John  Mearsheimer argued that AIPAC, along with a very wide 
array of allies, pushes  American foreign policy inflexibly in a pro-Israel 
direction. The article was  criticized as simplistic, sloppy and above all 
reductive, but in its core  suggestion that AIPAC often hinders the American 
government’s ability to  freely maneuver in the Middle East, it is difficult to 
argue with. As AIPAC  itself proudly reports, the organization is “consistently 
ranked as the most  influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol 
Hill,” and it uses  this influence to very successfully push a viewpoint that 
its critics claim  puts Israel’s total military dominance above efforts to 
broker Middle East  peace.
 
AIPAC suffered a relatively small  but symbolic defeat this past year — one 
that may prove to have been a turning  point. Earlier in the year, AIPAC put 
all its muscle behind a congressional  bill called the Palestinian 
Anti-Terrorism Act, which even some pro-Israel  observers called “draconian.” Going beyond 
even the Bush administration’s own  hard-line stance on the Hamas-led 
Palestinian government, it would have  essentially cut off all American contact with 
any element of the Palestinian  leadership, and hampered the U.S. government’s 
ability to strengthen  Palestinian moderates.
 
A group of small, left-leaning  Jewish lobby groups, including the Israel 
Policy Forum, the Jewish Alliance  for Justice and Peace and the Religious Action 
Center of Reform Judaism,  banded together to battle AIPAC on the issue, and 
in the end were successful.  A watered-down version of the bill was passed, 
with what they saw as the  problematic language stripped away. An AIPAC official 
recently told me that  AIPAC was satisfied with the softer bill’s passage — 
but it is quite clear  that the incident represented a defeat for the 
organization.
 
It was, in fact, an impressive  demonstration of what political cooperation 
and grass-roots advocacy can do.  However, for these groups to replicate that 
success on a larger scale and with  more of a substantive effect on U.S. 
foreign policy, there is a key missing  element: real money.
 
That is where billionaire  financier George Soros may come in, along with a 
group of other left-leaning  philanthropists, many of them Jewish. In the 
relatively close-knit Middle East  lobbying community, it is something of an open 
secret that this past  September, Morton Halperin, who served in both the Nixon 
and Clinton  administrations and is now director of U.S. advocacy for Soros’ 
Open Society  Institute, met with a group of lobbyists, political strategists 
and former  politicians who are seeking to create a new well-funded, 
well-organized,  left-leaning Israel lobby, as an alternative to AIPAC.
 
Several key figures in this group  had been active in the effort to quash the 
Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, and  include Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former advisor 
to President Clinton, and Daniel  Levy, a former special advisor to Israeli 
Prime Minister Ehud Barak and now a  senior fellow at the New America 
Foundation in Washington.
 
The group’s first meeting was  exploratory and unfocused, according to 
several attendees who spoke with me.  But in late October, Soros himself attended a 
follow-up meeting, along with  liquor magnates Edgar and Charles Bronfman, 
former Democratic Rep. Mel Levine  and others. The idea — by this point labeled 
the “Soros Initiative” — now  began to gain traction and substance, with large 
sums of money being pledged  by several parties. Several people involved have 
told me that there is now  almost enough money firmly on the table to launch 
the new organization — an  eight-figure dollar amount, they say, and that’s 
just for starters. Several  people have told me that there is already work in 
progress to establish the  organization’s core structure and operations.
 
What exactly would the new  organization do? According to Diane Balser, a 
board member of the Jewish  Alliance for Justice and Peace, one of the small 
left-wing groups involved in  the discussions, the goal is clear: “Organizing 
systematically to affect U.S.  foreign policy.” Levy, the former Barak advisor, 
explained that the movement  is “coming from a place where inside the mainstream 
Jewish community, people  are increasingly confused about something that 
describes itself as pro-Israel,  but is so out of sync with what they believe are 
good politics for the U.S. or  Israel.”
 
“The right-wing orientation in the  community is losing people by the droves, 
particularly young people,” M.J.  Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, one 
of the main groups involved, added.  “Most U.S. Jews support peace in the 
Middle East, and don’t want to shoot down  doves anytime they appear.”
 
The point of the initiative, Levy  told me, is not to “turn American policy 
against Israel. It is to reach out to  groups of philanthropists to get better 
resources and better focus and to  translate this into a political statement,” 
so that members of Congress will  know that they “will have cover if they 
seek to do what we and many in the  American Jewish Community think is right.”
 
There has been talk before about  establishing an alternative to the status 
quo represented by AIPAC, but the  added element of money from Soros and others 
could prove the pivotal  difference now. There is also the possibility that a 
connection to Soros could  itself be problematic. Soros has never been at all 
friendly to Israel, and his  involvement might scare off others who are 
left-leaning but still support  Israel. He is also one of the major funders of 
MoveOn.org and other left-wing  causes, and Republican lawmakers, and even some 
centrist Democrats, may not  want to be associated with him. An AIPAC insider 
repeatedly stressed to me  that one reason this new group will never be able to 
compete with AIPAC is  because AIPAC is bipartisan, while what he called the “
Soros connection” shows  that the new group will not be.
Levy, meanwhile, said that it is  “a misnomer” even to call it the “Soros 
Initiative,” because, as one of his  allies said, it’s not “Soros’ baby. He 
doesn’t want to be out front on  it.”
 
The AIPAC insider said that he  believes the “Soros Initiative” is little 
more than a fundraising drive to  raise money for some impoverished 
organizations that “have to define  themselves in opposition to something.” In fact, say 
those involved, a  contentious issue in the discussions is exactly how much 
the new organization  would allow itself to be seen as being in direct 
opposition to AIPAC. At least  four of the players involved have told me that they 
intend to be an  “alternative,” but not an “opposition.” Still, one of those 
present at the  early meetings said that he sees his organization as “the 
anti-AIPAC.” Levy,  meanwhile, said simply that if “there are differences in policy, 
those will be  expressed in one group advocating one thing and another 
advocating another  thing.” This would at least be an improvement, he said, over the 
past, when  Israeli leaders who honestly sought to make peace “pulled their 
hair out  because of the lack of support from the Jewish community in the 
United  States.”
 
I can attest from personal  experience that Levy likely picked up this sense 
of frustration from working  in the Israeli government. Once, when I was still 
a speechwriter for the  Israeli government at the U.N., I sat in on a meeting 
with a group of  right-leaning American Jewish lobbyists who were discussing 
how harshly to  react to the International Court of Justice’s ruling that 
Israel’s separation  barrier was illegal.
 
Afterward, a senior strategist for  the Israeli government said to me, “See, 
people inside the Israeli government  who are sincerely looking for peace have 
no choice but to wait. This prime  minister is not going to bring peace. This 
ambassador is not going to bring  peace.” He added, “And those people that 
we just met are sure as hell not  going to bring  peace





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