THE BACK STORY: WHAT IS AIPAC UP TO
antiwar.com
[An excellent piece on the covert power of AIPAC]
JUAN COLE, ANTI-WAR - The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a
lobbying group that used to support whatever government was in power in
Israel, and used to give money evenhandedly inside the U.S. My
perception is that during the past decade AIPAC has increasingly tilted
to the Likud in Israel, and to the political right in the United States.
In the 1980s, AIPAC set up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
as a pro-Israeli alternative to the Brookings Institution, which it
perceived to be insufficiently supportive of Israel. WINEP has largely
followed AIPAC into pro-Likud positions, even though its director,
Dennis Ross, is more moderate. He is a figurehead, however, serving to
disguise the far right character of most of the position papers produced
by long-term WINEP staff and by extremist visitors and "associates"
(Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer are among the latter).
WINEP, being a wing of AIPAC, is enormously influential in Washington.
State Department and military personnel are actually detailed there to
"learn" about the Middle East. They would get a far more balanced
education about the region in any Israeli university, since most Israeli
academics are professionals, whereas WINEP is a "think tank" that hires
by ideology.
I did some consulting with one U.S. company that had a government
contract, and they asked me about WINEP position papers (many of them
are just propaganda). When I said I would take them with a grain of
salt, the guy said his company had "received direction" to pay a lot of
attention to the WINEP material. So discipline is being imposed even on
the private sector.
Note that over 80% of American Jews vote Democrat, that the majority of
American Jews opposed the Iraq war (more were against it than in the
general population), and that American Jews have been enormously
important in securing civil liberties for all Americans. Moreover,
Israel has been a faithful ally of the U.S. and deserves our support in
ensuring its security. The Likudniks like to pretend that they represent
American Jewry, but they do not. And they like to suggest that objecting
to their policies is tantamount to anti-Semitism, which is sort of like
suggesting that if you don't like Chile's former dictator Pinochet, you
are bigoted against Latinos. . .
It should be admitted that the American Likud could not make U.S. policy
on its own. Its members had to make convincing arguments to Rumsfeld,
Cheney and Bush himself. But they were able to make those arguments, by
distorting intelligence, channeling Ahmed Chalabi junk, and presenting
Big Ideas to men above them that signally lacked such ideas. . .
It was these WINEP and AIPAC-linked U.S. Likud backers in the Defense
Department who had the Iraqi army dissolved as soon as Saddam was
overthrown. This step threw Iraq into chaos and led to the deaths of
nearly a thousand U.S. servicemen so far, since an Iraq without an army
would inevitably depend on the U.S. military. . .
The Likud policies of reversing Oslo and stealing people's land and
making their lives hell has produced enormous amounts of terrorism
against Israel, and the Likudniks have cleverly turned that to their
political advantage. Aggression and annexation is necessary, they argue,
because there is terrorism. . .
The drawback for the U.S. in all this is that U.S. government backing
for Sharon's odious policies makes it hated in the Muslim world. (Note
that Muslims who oppose Israeli aggression are often tagged as
"terrorists" by the U.S. government, but right-wing Jews who go to
Palestine to colonize it, walking around with Uzi machine guns and
sometimes shooting down civilians, are not "terrorists.") This lack of
balance is one big reason that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri hit the U.S. on
Sept. 11. In fact, bin Laden wanted to move up the operation to punish
the U.S. for supporting Sharon's crackdown on the second Intifada.
Likud apologists have carefully planted the false story that al-Qaeda
did not care about Palestine, but that is absurd. Bin Laden always
complained about the occupation of the three holy cities (Mecca, Medina
and Jerusalem, the first two because of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and
the third under Israeli occupation). When bin Laden came back from
Afghanistan to Jidda in 1989, his first sermon at the local mosque was
about the Israeli repression of Palestinians during the first Intifada.
Now the U.S.' occupation of Iraq is making it even more hated in the
Muslim world. It is a policy hatched in part by AIPAC, WINEP, and their
associated "thinkers." The cynical might suggest that they actively want
the U.S. involved in a violent struggle with Muslims, to make sure that
the U.S. remains anti-Palestinian and so will permit Israeli expansion.
. .
On the rare occasion when a brave member of Congress dares stand up to
this unrelenting AIPAC tyranny, that person is targeted for unelection
in the next congressional campaign, with big money directed by AIPAC
and/or its analogues into the coffers of the senator's or congressman's
opponent. Over and over again, AIPAC has shaped the U.S. Congress in
this way, so successfully that no one even dares speak out any more.
AIPAC is not all that rich or powerful, but politics in the U.S. is
often evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Because many
races are very close, any little extra support can help change the
outcome. AIPAC can provide that little bit. Moreover, most Americans
couldn't care less about the Middle East or its intractable problems,
whereas the staffers at AIPAC are fanatics. . .
The situation has reached comedic proportions. Congress is always
drafting letters to the president, based on AIPAC templates, demanding
that lopsided U.S. policy in favor of Israel be revised to be even more
in favor of Israel. U.S. policy recently changed to endorse the
expansion of Israeli colonies in Palestinian, West Bank territory. . .
AIPAC currently has a project to shut up academics such as myself, the
same way it has shut up Congress, through congressional legislation
mandating "balance" (i.e., pro-Likud stances) in Middle East programs at
American universities. How long the U.S. public will allow itself to be
spied on and pushed around like this is a big question. And, with the
rise of international terrorism targeting the U.S. in part over these
issues, the fate of the country hangs in the balance.
NEW SLUMP IN IMMIGRATION TO ISRAEL
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE - Immigration to Israel further slumped in 2004,
as a rise in Jews coming from Western countries failed to compensate for
plummeting numbers of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the
Jewish Agency said Friday. "Israel is set to absorb some 22,000
immigrants this year," compared with around 25,000 in 2003, the agency's
spokesman, Yarden Vatikai, told AFP. . . The number of French and US
Jews moving to Israel in 2004 went up 20 percent but remained quite
modest with 2,400 coming from France and 2,800 from the United States.
In 2002, 34,831 people immigrated to Israel, compared with 44,000 in
2001 and 60,000 in 2000 -- numbers that were already in stark contrast
with the massive wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union in the
1990s. Jewish immigration in 2004 is five times lower than that forecast
by Israel's Prime Minster Ariel Sharon for the next ten years. |
