AIPAC is expanding its Washington, DC offices and building a new 11-story building next door, nearly tripling the pro-Israel organization’s office space. (PHOTO COURTESY WIKIWANT.COM)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2022, pp. 18-19
History’s Shadows
By Walter L. Hixson
IN 2019 the Israel lobby smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) with the baseless charge that she had invoked “anti-Semitic tropes” by stating the obvious, that the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Congress was “all about the Benjamins.” Now, three years later, AIPAC has announced the formation of a new PAC and super PAC enabling the pro-Israel lobby to engage in direct funding of political candidates, which AIPAC had previously farmed out to smaller PACs.
The move confirms that when it comes to maintaining a compliant Congress, it truly is all about those Benjamins that the lobby regularly pours into propaganda and political campaigns. AIPAC’s entry into direct lobbying provides a good opportunity to probe the historical trajectory of the preeminent pro-Israel lobby organization.
From its inception to this day, the primary focus of the Israel lobby, encompassing AIPAC (officially formed in 1959) and myriad other Israel affinity organizations, has been to secure and to strengthen the grip on Congress. AIPAC has been stunningly successful in that effort, thereby ensuring the smooth flow of annual multi-billion-dollar American welfare checks to a tiny aggressor state located some 7,000 miles from U.S. shores.
Over the years AIPAC has evolved, becoming larger, richer, more domineering and more right-wing. For years AIPAC was directed by liberal Democrats who today express outrage over the lobby’s illiberal tactics and behavior. These critics, notably Thomas Dine and M.J. Rosenberg, are hypocrites insofar as they advanced, especially in the 1980s, many of AIPAC’s most effective lobbying tactics and techniques. Nonetheless, their criticism—well presented in the Israeli-made and appropriately entitled documentary on AIPAC, “The Kings of Capitol Hill”—underscores the rightward shift.
The lobby suffered a few setbacks in the 2020 elections, not the least of which was the defeat of Donald Trump, who had given Israel everything that it wanted—including the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, as well as the torpedoing of the Iran nuclear agreement. In another blow to AIPAC, Rep. Eliot Engel, a longtime lobby mouthpiece and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lost his seat in New York to Jamaal Bowman. AIPAC’s affiliates also targeted and invested millions trying to unseat several critics in Congress, including Omar, who like most of the others weathered the lobby storm.
These failures are probably a big part of the AIPAC decision to take up direct lobbying. Lobby elites may also be concerned about losing ground because of the COVID-inspired cancellations of AIPAC’s annual policy conferences in 2021 and 2022. Those signature events provide a regular opportunity to trumpet AIPAC’s domination of Congress, as they invariably feature a parade of representatives and senators from both political parties, prostrating themselves before the lobby throng, to gush their undying support for Israel.
As the famous French saying goes, however, the more things change the more they remain the same. Last November, now-congressman Bowman, who had criticized Engel’s slavish support for Israel during the campaign, posed for photographs alongside Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during a trip to Israel. Another in a series of warrior, and often war-criminal, Israeli prime ministers, Bennett boasts of personally killing “lots of Arabs,” opposes a Palestinian state and describes himself as “more right-wing” than Binyamin Netanyahu.
Continuing AIPAC domination of Congress was further displayed this past September in a typically lopsided 420-9 House vote proposing to provide Israel with another $1 billion (in addition to the $3.8 billion it receives annually for militarism in general) for the Iron Dome. The missile defense system enhances Israel’s ability to bombard the captive Gaza Strip or Hezbollah or Syrian territory while sharply reducing the threat of incoming missiles to its own population. Only Omar and a few other mostly progressives voted against American financing of ongoing Israeli militarism. Some progressives, including Bowman, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who otherwise have been highly critical of Israel’s actions, lacked the courage to vote against the Iron Dome (AOC voted “present”).
Much as Omar was subjected to vitriolic contempt in 2019 over her “Benjamins” comment, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) drew outrage during the Iron Dome debate for boldly denouncing Israel on the House floor as an un-democratic apartheid regime. Tlaib accurately characterized Israel, which is a racist, militarist, undemocratic and rogue state, that regularly violates international law and violently deprives Palestinians of basic human rights. This description is not rhetorical—those are demonstrable facts—unlike the mendacious propaganda that AIPAC regularly disgorges.
AIPAC, of course, knows what the true facts are, and it therefore raises and invests millions of dollars in a ceaseless campaign to deny and distort reality. Those who deny the crucial role of the lobby should ask themselves why AIPAC continues to raise and spend millions of dollars and why it has dramatically expanded its work force as well as its physical facilities at its sprawling but unmarked office building on H Street.
While in some ways AIPAC today is more formidable than ever, in others its ability to command the broader narrative is in mortal jeopardy. More and more Americans, including importantly Jewish Americans, are recognizing, and condemning Israeli aggression and apartheid.
It remains to be seen how long a lobby that rests on a foundation of lies and disinformation can hold out against the ever-changing forces of history.
History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Centre of US Middle East Policy and Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor
——————————————-
