[WCUSP] Fwd: The OTHER Israel lobby, by Gregory Levey

[Odile Hugonot Haber]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:47:05 -0500
Subject: The OTHER Israel lobby, by Gregory Levey
To: karendes at umich.edu

December 20, 2006


Subject: The other Israel lobby, by Gregory Levey
Distributed by: PLO Mission â€" Washington, DC


1) The other Israel lobby

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.
salon.com
By Gregory Levey
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/12/19/israellobby/index.html

Dec. 19, 2006 | 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."

2) Afif Safieh, the Head of the PLO Mission to the United States,
wrote in the opinion: "The American National Interest" that we
circulated on July 2006:

I personally believe that AIPAC, the official pro-Israeli lobby in
Washington, in spite of all appearances, is no more in its golden era
and that for 4 reasons:

1-     The "monopoly" of representation of the American Jewish
community by AIPAC is increasingly challenged within the community;
2-     An important segment of the Israeli political establishment is
increasingly uncomfortable with AIPAC â€"and this goes back to the
late Prime Minister Ishak Rabin- because of its constant support for
the Israeli "maximalist" preference not because it is desirable but
simply because it is "do-able" on Capitol Hill;
3-     Within the American Administration there is an increasing
irritation with the excesses of AIPAC and the trial case of the two
senior officials for espionage is one of its manifestations;
4-     Within American public opinion, there is a growing allergy for
the enormous power of lobbies and interest groups in general.

In his lectures, Safieh often stresses that "we are not inviting
America to sacrifice a traditional friend: Israel.  We are offering
America and additional one: Palestine.

3) Visit our new website www.plomission.us




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