A must read on how the Zionist American community
effectively organized themselves to strongly influence US politics and how that
is changing, with key lessons our community can learn: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/friends-israel
It is very long but below are some key parts:
BY CONNIE BRUCK | The New Yorker
This is precisely the kind of ambivalence that AIPAC
adherents describe as destructive. And yet even Israeli politicians recognize
that AIPAC faces a shifting landscape of opinion. Shimon Peres, who served as
Prime Minister and, most recently, as President, says, “My impression is that
AIPAC is weaker among the younger people. It has a solid majority of people of
a certain age, but it’s not the same among younger people.”..
" Members’ contributions were often bundled. “AIPAC
will select some dentist in Boise, say, to be the bundler,” a former longtime
AIPAC member said. “They tell people in New York and other cities to send their
five-thousand-dollar checks to him. But AIPAC has to teach people
discipline—because all those people who are giving five thousand dollars would
ordinarily want recognition. The purpose is to make the dentist into a big
shot—he’s the one who has all this money to give to the congressman’s
campaign.” AIPAC representatives tried to match each member of Congress with a
contact who shared the congressman’s interests. If a member of Congress rode a
Harley-Davidson, AIPAC found a contact who did, too. The goal was to develop
people who could get a member of Congress on the phone at a moment’s
notice."
In the early days, Howard Berman said, “AIPAC was knocking
on an unlocked door.” Most Americans have been favorably disposed toward Israel
since its founding, and no other lobby spoke for them on a national scale.
Unlike other lobbies—such as the N.R.A., which is opposed by various anti-gun
groups—AIPAC did not face a significant and well-funded countervailing force.
It also had the resources to finance an expensive and emotionally charged form
of persuasion. Dine estimated that in the eighties and nineties contributions
from AIPAC members often constituted roughly ten to fifteen per cent of a
typical congressional campaign budget. AIPAC provided lavish trips to Israel
for legislators and other opinion-makers.
Nevertheless, the lobby did not endorse or rank candidates.
“We made the decision to be one step removed,” Dine said. “Orrin Hatch once
said, ‘Dine, your genius is to play an invisible bass drum, and the Jews hear
it when you play it.’ ” In 1982, after an Illinois congressman named Paul
Findley described himself as “Yasir Arafat’s best friend in Congress,” AIPAC
members encouraged Dick Durbin, a political unknown, to run against him. Robert
Asher, a Chicago businessman, sent out scores of letters to his friends, along
with Durbin’s position paper on Israel, asking them to send checks. Durbin won,
and he is now the Senate Majority Whip. (Findley later wrote a book that made
extravagant claims about the power of the Israel lobby.) In 1984, AIPAC
affiliates decided that Senator Charles Percy, an Illinois Republican, was
unfriendly to Israel. In the next election, Paul Simon, a liberal Democrat, won
Percy’s seat. Dine said at the time, “Jews in America, from coast to coast,
gathered to oust Percy. And American politicians—those who hold public
positions now, and those who aspire—got the message.”…
In the spring of 2008, AIPAC moved from cramped quarters on
Capitol Hill to a gleaming new seven-story building on H Street, downtown. At
the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Howard Kohr introduced Sheldon Adelson, a casino
magnate who had been a generous donor to AIPAC since the nineties, and who had
helped underwrite congressional trips to Israel (paying only for Republican
members). On this bright spring day, according to someone who was in the
audience, Adelson recalled that Kohr had telephoned him, asking him to have
lunch. Adelson remembered wondering, How much is this lunch going to cost me?
Well, he went on, it cost him ten million dollars: the building was the result.
He later told his wife that Kohr should have asked him for fifty million….
AIPAC’s hold on Congress has become institutionalized. Each
year, a month or two before the annual policy conference, AIPAC officials tell
key members what measures they want, so that their activists have something to
lobby for. “Every year, we create major legislation, so they can justify their
existence to their members,” the former congressional aide said. (AIPAC
maintains that only members of Congress initiate legislative action.) AIPAC
board meetings are held in Washington each month, and directors visit members
of Congress. They generally address them by their first names, even if they
haven’t met before. The intimacy is presumed, but also, at times, earned; local
AIPAC staffers, in the manner of basketball recruiters, befriend some members
when they are still serving on the student council. “If you have a dream about
running for office, AIPAC calls you,” one House member said. Certainly, it’s a
rarity when someone undertakes a campaign for the House or the Senate today
without hearing from AIPAC.
In 1996, Brian Baird, a psychologist from Seattle, decided
to run for Congress. Local Democrats asked if he had thought about what he was
going to say to AIPAC. “I had admired Israel since I was a kid,” Baird told me.
“But I also was fairly sympathetic to peaceful resolution and the Palestinian
side. These people said, ‘We respect that, but let’s talk about the issues and
what you might say.’ The difficult reality is this: in order to get elected to
Congress, if you’re not independently wealthy, you have to raise a lot of
money. And you learn pretty quickly that, if AIPAC is on your side, you can do
that. They come to you and say, ‘We’d be happy to host ten-thousand-dollar
fund-raisers for you, and let us help write your annual letter, and please come
to this multi-thousand-person dinner.’ ” Baird continued, “Any member of
Congress knows that AIPAC is associated indirectly with significant amounts of
campaign spending if you’re with them, and significant amounts against you if
you’re not with them.” For Baird, AIPAC-connected money amounted to about two
hundred thousand dollars in each of his races—“and that’s two hundred thousand
going your way, versus the other way: a four-hundred-thousand-dollar swing.”…
Soon after taking office, Baird went on a “virtually
obligatory” trip to Israel: a freshman ritual in which
everything—business-class flights, accommodations at the King David or the
Citadel—is paid for by AIPAC’s charitable arm. The tours are carefully curated.
“They do have you meet with the Palestinian leaders, in a sort of token
process,” Baird said. “But then when you’re done with it they tell you
everything the Palestinian leaders said that’s wrong. And, of course, the
Palestinians don’t get to have dinner with you at the hotel that night.”…
In early 2009, after a brief truce between Israel and Hamas
collapsed in a series of mutual provocations, Israel carried out Operation Cast
Lead, an incursion into Gaza in which nearly fourteen hundred Palestinians were
killed, along with thirteen Israelis. Baird visited the area a few weeks later
and returned several times. As he wrote in an op-ed, he saw “firsthand the devastating
destruction of hospitals, schools, homes, industries, and infrastructure.” That
September, the U.N. Human Rights Council issued a report, based on an inquiry
led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, that accused Israel of a
series of possible war crimes. AIPAC attacked the report, saying it was
“rigged.” A month later, an AIPAC-sponsored resolution to condemn the report
was introduced in the House, and three hundred and forty-four members voted in
favor. “I read every single word of that report, and it comported with what I
had seen and heard on the ground in Gaza,” Baird said. “When we had the vote, I
said, ‘We have member after member coming to the floor to vote on a resolution
they’ve never read, about a report they’ve never seen, in a place they’ve never
been.’ ” Goldstone came under such pressure that threats were made to ban him
from his grandson’s bar mitzvah at a Johannesburg synagogue. He eventually
wrote an op-ed in which he expressed regret for his conclusions, saying,
“Civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” Other
members of the council stood by the report.
Baird said, “When key votes are cast, the question on the
House floor, troublingly, is often not ‘What is the right thing to do for the
United States of America?’ but ‘How is AIPAC going to score this?’ ” He added,
“There’s such a conundrum here, of believing that you’re supporting Israel,
when you’re actually backing policies that are antithetical to its highest
values and, ultimately, destructive for the country.” In talks with Israeli
officials, he found that his inquiries were not treated with much respect. In
2003, one of his constituents, Rachel Corrie, was killed by a bulldozer driven
by an Israeli soldier, as she protested the demolition of Palestinians’ homes
in Gaza. At first, he said, the officials told him, “There’s a simple
explanation—here are the facts.” Or, “We will look into it.” But, when he
continued to press, something else would emerge. “There is a disdain for the
U.S., and a dismissal of any legitimacy of our right to question—because who
are we to talk about moral values?” Baird told me. “Whether it’s that we didn’t
help early enough in the Holocaust, or look at what we did to our
African-Americans, or our Native Americans—whatever! And they see us, members
of Congress, as basically for sale. So they want us to shut up and play the game.”…
“I think there is a growing sense among members that things
are done just to placate AIPAC, and that AIPAC is not really working to advance
what is in the interest of the United States.” He concluded, “We all took an
oath of office. And AIPAC, in many instances, is asking us to ignore it.”
A few months later, the Gaza war began, and AIPAC mobilized
again. “There were conference calls, mass e-mails, talking points for the day,”
a congressional aide said. “AIPAC activists would e-mail me, with fifteen other
AIPAC activists cc’d, and then those people would respond, saying, ‘I agree
entirely with what the first e-mail said!’ ”…
It didn’t hurt AIPAC’s cause that the enemy was Hamas, whose
suicide bombings a decade ago killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, and whose
rocket attacks in recent years have terrorized citizens, particularly in
southern Israel. As Israel pressed its offensive, and hundreds of Palestinian
civilians were killed, AIPAC argued, as did Netanyahu, that the casualties came
only because Hamas was using human shields. Online, AIPAC posted a short film,
“Israel’s Moral Defense,” which depicted an Israeli major in a quandary.
Looking at a schoolyard filled with girls in neat uniforms, he sees fighters
with a rocket launcher not far behind them. Should he order his men to fire
their machine guns, and risk hitting the girls, or hold back, and risk the
rocket killing Israelis? “I didn’t pull the trigger,” the soldier says. “We are
totally different. . . . I am very proud to be in an army that has this level
of morality.” A couple of weeks after the film appeared, Israeli shells struck
a United Nations school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing twenty-one people
and injuring more than ninety; it was the sixth U.N. school that Israel had
bombed. The next day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,
Navi Pillay, pointed out that, as Israeli forces attacked homes, schools, and
hospitals, the U.S. was supplying them with heavy weaponry. Almost
simultaneously, the House passed an AIPAC-supported resolution denouncing
Hamas’s use of human shields and condemning an inquiry into Israel’s Gaza
operations that Pillay was sponsoring.
According to congressional staffers, some members of
Congress seemed eager to make up for their recent apostasy on the Iran
negotiations. While Reid and his colleagues went to extraordinary lengths to
fund the Iron Dome missile-defense system, the House leadership engaged in the
same mission. The vote in the House came late on the night of Friday, August
1st—the last possible moment before the summer recess. The earlier resolutions
that AIPAC had sponsored during the war had passed unanimously, with no record
of individual votes, but on this vote the roll was called. (AIPAC sometimes
asks congressional leaders to call the roll when a decisive victory seems
likely.) “I think AIPAC thought this vote would be one hundred per cent,” Jim
Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, said. It was close: out of four hundred and
thirty-five members, only eight voted no. Moran, who has been in Congress since
1990, and is retiring this year, was one of four Democrats who voted against
the resolution. As a longtime member of the Defense Appropriations Committee,
he did not believe that there was any urgent need for the funding. “We have put
about nine hundred million dollars into the Iron Dome,” he argued. “We know
that there are many millions unexpended in Israel’s Iron Dome account. And
Israel was to get three hundred and fifty-one million on October 1st, for Iron
Dome.”
Beto O’Rourke, a freshman Democrat from El Paso, also voted
against the funding. “I tried to find him on the floor, but I couldn’t,” Moran
said. “I wanted him to switch his vote. Now, he might not have switched it
anyway, because—as shocking as it may be—he’s in Congress solely to do what he
considers to be the right thing. I’m afraid he may have a tough race in
November.” The morning after the vote, O’Rourke e-mailed a local AIPAC
activist, Stuart Schwartz, to explain his vote, according to a knowledgeable
person. In his explanation, which he also posted on Facebook, he pointed out
that he had voted for Iron Dome in the past, and had supported the funds that
were scheduled to arrive in October. But, he wrote, “I could not in good
conscience vote for borrowing $225 million more to send to Israel, without debate
and without discussion, in the midst of a war that has cost more than a
thousand civilian lives already, too many of them children.” Within hours,
O’Rourke was flooded with e-mails, texts, and calls. The next day, the El Paso
Times ran a front-page story with the headline “O’ROURKE VOTE DRAWS CRITICISM.”
In the story, Stuart Schwartz, who is described as having donated a thousand
dollars to O’Rourke’s previous campaign, commented that O’Rourke “chooses to
side with the rocket launchers and terror tunnel builders.” A mass e-mail
circulated, reading “The Following Is Shameful, El Paso Has an Anti-Israel
Congressman. . . . Do Not Reëlect Beto O’Rourke.” At the bottom was the address
of AIPAC’s Web site, and a snippet of text: “AIPAC is directly responsible for
the overwhelming support this legislation received on the Hill. If you are not
a member of AIPAC, I strongly recommend that you join. Every dollar helps fund
this important work in Congress.”
The day that Congress passed the Iron Dome bills happened to
be an especially deadly one in Gaza. In the city of Rafah, Israeli troops
pursued Hamas fighters with such overwhelming force that about a hundred and
fifty Palestinians were killed, many of them women and children. Israel’s
critics in the region have been energized. Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian
legislator, told me that Congress had sent a clear message by funding Iron Dome
that day. “Congress was telling Israel, ‘You go ahead and kill, and we will
fund it for you.’ ” She argued that Israelis had dominated American political
discourse on the war, as they have for decades on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. “They say, ‘The Palestinians are all terrorists, they are the people
we don’t know, they are alien, foreign, strange—but Israelis are like us.’ Who shaped
the presentation, in the U.S.? AIPAC, to a large degree.”
