openpolitics.com

The lobbying group AIPAC has consistently fought the Obama Administration on policy. Is it now losing influence?

The bill, co-sponsored by Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was drafted with considerable input from AIPAC. This was the first time in decades that the lobby had challenged the sitting U.S. President so overtly.

The Obama Administration was furious. “It’s one thing to disagree on some aspect of the peace process, on things that are tough for Israel to do,” the senior Administration official told me. “But this is American foreign policy that they were seeking to essentially derail. There was no other logic to it than ending the negotiations, and the gravity of that was shocking.”

.. Republicans knew that they would never get more than a minority of the Jewish electorate, but AIPAC members convinced them that voting the right way would lead to campaign contributions. It was a winning argument. In 1984, Mitch McConnell narrowly beat AIPACsupporters’ preferred candidate, the incumbent Democrat Walter Huddleston. Afterward, McConnell met with two AIPAC officials and said to them, “Let me be very clear. What do I need to do to make sure that the next time around I get the community support?”AIPAC members let Republicans know that, if they supported AIPACpositions, the lobby would view them as “friendly incumbents,” and would not abandon them for a Democratic challenger.

..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.

.. The Gang of Four, a former AIPAC official noted, “created an interesting mantra that they honestly believed: that, if AIPAC had existed prior to the Second World War, America would have stopped Hitler. It’s a great motivator, and a great fund-raiser—but I think it’s also AIPAC’s greatest weakness. Because if you convince yourself that, if only you had been around, six million Jews would not have been killed, then you sort of lose sight of the fact that the U.S. has its own foreign policy, and, while it is extremely friendly to Israel, it will only go so far.”

.. AIPAC officially supports a two-state solution, but many of its members, and many of the speakers at its conferences, loudly oppose such an agreement. Tom Dine has said that the lobby’s tacit position is “We’ll work against it until it happens.”

.. Netanyahu prides himself on understanding the American political climate. But his deepest relationships are with older, often wealthy members of the establishments in New York and Los Angeles, and he is less conscious of the changes in American demographics and in opinion among younger American Jews.

.. 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.’ ”

.. Few current members of Congress are as outspoken about AIPAC as Baird. Staff members fret about whether AIPAC will prevent them from getting a good consulting job when they leave government.

.. 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.”

.. “Increasingly, Israel has become a wedge issue, something to be used against the President by the Republicans, and it can be very unhelpful.”

.. At the same time, AIPAC was urging Reid to bring the measure to a vote—and, as the former congressional aide noted, “you don’t alienate a key fund-raising base, especially when you may be about to lose the Senate.”

.. As congressional Democrats continued to meet in the White House Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, referred to the proposed sanctions as part of a “march to war.” Not long afterward, Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said, “If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so.”

.. According to a former Senate aide, the lobbyists seemed to realize that if they continued to push they would have to give up any claim to bipartisanship. Two days later, AIPAC issued a statement saying that the time was not right for a vote;

.. “I think there is a growing sense among members that things are done just to placate AIPAC, and thatAIPAC is not really working to advance what is in the interest of the United States.” He concluded, “We all took an oath of office. AndAIPAC, in many instances, is asking us to ignore it.”