[WCUSP] WPost: A Beautiful Friendship? re: the Israel lobby's influence in Washington

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

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Correction to This Article
The July 16  Magazine cover story about U.S.-Israeli relations misstated the 
names of two  organizations: The PAC founded by Morris Amitay is the 
Washington Political  Action Committee, and CAMERA stands for the Committee for 
Accuracy in Middle  East Reporting in America. The article also incorrectly said that 
historian  Michael Oren received his PhD from Hebrew University in Jerusalem; 
it was  actually Princeton University in New Jersey. 

A  Beautiful Friendship?
In search of the truth about the Israel  lobby's influence on Washington
By Glenn Frankel
Sunday, July 16, 2006; W13
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 résumé 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." 
Glenn Frankel is a staff writer for the Magazine and The Post's former  
Jerusalem bureau chief. He will be fielding questions and comments about this  
article _Monday at noon_ 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/14/DI2006071400780.html) . 
© 2006 The  Washington Post Company
 
_ 
 

 
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