Israel vs. The Pro-Israel Lobby
Israel vs. The Pro-Israel Lobby
Ordinarily, when
Washington’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby asks senators to do
something, lawmakers of both parties are happy to oblige. Not just some
of them. All of them. On crucial Capitol Hill votes, measures favored by
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, often pass
unopposed.
Last week was
different. Very, very different. First, AIPAC was forced in the wake of
Democratic opposition to retreat for the moment on the Iran sanctions
bill the group had been pushing for months. Then, nearly every
Republican in the Senate ignored AIPAC’s call for a retreat on the bill,
and decided to keep on pushing for a vote on it, anyway.
Somehow, on the issue arguably of
most importance to both the Israeli government and America’s pro-Israel
community—Iran and its nuclear ambitions—AIPAC didn’t merely fail to
deliver. It alienated its most ardent supporters, and helped turn what
was a bipartisan effort to keep Iran in check into just another
political squabble. The lobby that everybody in Washington publicly
backs somehow managed to piss off just about everyone.
Even
the Israeli government isn’t happy with AIPAC’s handling of the
sanctions bill. Sen. Bob Corker, the ranking member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, said he had a “very direct conversation”
with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer on the
sanctions bill early last month. “AIPAC and Israel are in different
places on this issue,” Corker said of his conversation with Dermer, who
he said supported the sanctions bill now and not at a later date.
On February 3, AIPAC senior
members (known inside the organizations as “key contacts”) began
reaching out to Republican Senators to say that now was not the time to
vote on an Iran sanctions bill opposed bitterly by the White House,
according to four Senate sources who spoke to the Daily Beast on
condition of anonymity. Until then, AIPAC was willing to endure open
criticism from the White House, who had described the sanctions push as a
rush to war. And why not? With 59 co-sponsors, the bill seemed almost guaranteed to pass.
Among
the lawmakers reached were a handful of Republican senators who
included Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell; Sen. Mark Kirk (the
Republican co-sponsor of the bill AIPAC had been pushing to support
until then) and Sen. Lindsey Graham, another stalwart ally of Israel.
AIPAC
has many ways of communicating with Congress, but the “key contacts”
are particularly important. They are AIPAC members that have a personal
relationship with a given senator or Congressman and are usually either a
fundraiser, big donor or a personal friend such as a former college
room mate, according to a former senior lobbyist for the group. Former
AIPAC legislative liaison Ralph Nurnberger defined the key contacts as “someone who has enough of a personal relationship that the elected official would return a phone call within a day.”
Because
of these personal relationships, the lobby can often be very effective.
Unlike a professional insider in Washington, the key contact has a
history with the member of Congress and is already considered an
important political ally.
This is one reason why it was so
unusual that the vast majority of Republicans on Wednesday evening told
Harry Reid they were not going along with AIPAC. According to Senate
staffers the phone calls did not go well. “AIPAC is close to Schumer and
Reid who told them to pull back on the sanctions bill,” one GOP senate
staffer told the Daily Beast. “Republicans responded with a big middle
finger.”
The extension of that
middle finger began on Tuesday afternoon at a weekly lunch for
Republican senators. Kirk brought with him a draft of the letter to Reid
and made the case to his colleagues to sign it, according to the staff
members. A little more than a day later he had the signatures of 42 out
of 45 Republican senators on the letter.
Republicans and Democrats these
days bicker all the time. But when it comes to Iran sanctions and
pro-Israel legislation in general, the two parties are almost always on
the same page. In 2010 the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability,
and Divestment Act which first imposed a secondary boycott on Iran’s
oil sector passed the Senate 99 to 0. In 2011, a Kirk-Menendez amendment
to blacklist Iran’s central bank from the global financial sector
passed the Senate 100 to 0. In 2012, another Kirk-Menendez amendment
passed the Senate 94 to 0. And last summer a resolution saying the
United States would support Israel if it attacked Iran passed 99 to 0.
Menendez—Kirk’s
co-sponsor on the Iran sanctions bill—himself was caught off guard,
according to Senate staffers. In his floor speech Thursday, Menendez
added a line at the last minute that referenced the Republican effort to
continue to push for a vote, saying,
“I hope that we will not find ourselves in a partisan process trying to
force a vote on this national security matter before its appropriate
time.”
After the speech, AIPAC released a
statement that said the group agreed with Menendez “that stopping the
Iranian nuclear program should rest on bipartisan support and that there
should not be a vote at this time on the measure.
That
AIPAC press release prompted a rare rebuke from one of the group’s
biggest allies on the political right. William Kristol, issued a
statement from his organization the Emergency Committee for Israel—a
group that has also fought for the Kirk-Menendez bill—warning, “It would
be terrible if history’s judgment on the pro-Israel community was that
it made a fetish of bipartisanship—and got a nuclear Iran.
From the perspective of
Republican supporters of Israel, AIPAC’s emphasis on bipartisanship in
the Obama era has too often meant accommodating a president who has
openly clashed with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on some
of the most important issues. While Obama has in some cases gone way
beyond his predecessors in supporting Israel—such as his funding the
development of a rocket defense shield known as Iron Dome—the president
has also fought publicly with Netanyahu on the construction of
settlements, the chemical weapons deal with Syria, and more recently on
whether Iran would be able to keep a nuclear enrichment program in a
final deal with world powers.
This
has created a dissonance at times between the Israeli government and
the organization that lobbies to strengthen the U.S.-Israel
relationship. Netanyahu’s first reaction to the interim Iran deal in
November after being briefed by Secretary of State John Kerry for
example was to call it the “deal of the century.” By contrast, AIPAC
took a more muted tone saying it have a “difference of strategy” with
the Obama White House.
AIPAC’s muted tone on the Iran
talks opposed by Israel’s government led the group to focus on how to
allow Democrats to support a sanctions bill opposed by the leader of
their party. On a December 18 conference call to pro-Israel activists
and lobbyists, AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr told his ground
troops to focus on how AIPAC had an “honest policy disagreement not a
personality disagreement with Obama,” according to a recording of the
call played for the Daily Beast.
In
making the case for the Kirk-Menendez sanctions, AIPAC said it would
enhance Obama’s leverage in negotiations with Iran. Democratic and
Republican Senate staffers both said this argument was a way to appeal
to Democrats who did not want to be in open conflict with Obama. The
president responded by saying he did not need such leverage and the
sanctions bill would destroy the delicate negotiations with Iran.
Corker
was one of three members of his party who did not sign Kirk’s letter.
In an interview Monday, he said AIPAC members did not call him. He was
not critical of other Republicans, but he said the letter would not get
the Senate any closer to passing new sanctions on Iran that may preserve
the economic pressure on the country that he assessed was dissipating
during the negotiations.
Corker said AIPAC now “finds itself twisted in a knot.”
Obviously they are trying to
navigate keeping access to the administration and candidly their support
of Israel and their support of the Democratic Party. They find
themselves in a very tough spot,” he said.
But
Republicans weren’t the only ones upset with AIPAC. In the instance of
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National
Committee, AIPAC sent a letter to supporters asking her to support the
sanctions she was telling her constituents in Florida that she
supported. The letter, however, included a link to a highly critical
article about her from the Washington Free Beacon. A member of AIPAC’s national board and a donor to Wasserman-Schultz, Bruce Levy then criticized the letter in an interview with Foreign Policy Magazine.
This incident came despite
AIPAC’s concerted effort to woo Democrats for more than a decade’s
special emphasis on Democrats is not particularly new. In 2003, the
group authorized a study (known inside the organization as an internal
strategic planning exercise) about how to reach out to core Democratic
constituencies, according to former lobbyists for the organization.
“AIPAC had been vexed for some years by allegations that it was tilted
to the Republicans and had moved away from Democrats,” said Steve Rosen,
the group’s former director of foreign policy who was fired by AIPAC in
2005 after the Justice Department alleged that he solicited classified
information from a Pentagon analyst. In Obama’s first year in office the
Justice Department dropped its prosecution.
Rosen
said AIPAC at the time thought the charge that it was tilting right was
“a false allegation,” he said, “it was repeated so often that something
had to be done about it. This was an effort to build stronger links to
many of the core constituencies of the Democratic Party.”
As
a result of the study, AIPAC hired specialized staff to make the case
for the Jewish state to Hispanics, African Americans, Reform Jewish
Rabbis and eventually even labor unions. (The exercise also resulted in a
renewed effort to reach out to evangelical Christians, a core
Republican constituency).
But the price of partisanship in the Obama era at
least has been an unwillingness until recently to openly oppose the
president. For example, despite the opposition of many Republicans and
other pro-Israel groups such as Christians United For Israel, AIPAC
chose last January not to weigh in on the nomination fight of Chuck Hagel,
the current defense secretary. In September, after President Obama said
he would be seeking a war authorization from Congress to strike Syria,
AIPAC lobbied Congress for the resolution at the request of the White House.
At the time, even the Israeli government was reticent about AIPAC’s
push for the resolution, according to one former senior Israeli
official.
When
AIPAC supported the Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill over the objections of
the White House, it marked new phase for the lobby. “There are a lot of
Democratic senators who are up for election this year,” one Republican
Senate staff member said. “I bet they would vote against the White House
if AIPAC pushed for a vote.”
That
vote may eventually come. On Friday, AIPAC’s president Michael Kassen,
issued a statement he said he had hoped would clarify what he said was a
mischaracterization that AIPAC no longer supported the Kirk-Menendez
legislation. “We still have much work to do over the coming months,” he
said. “It will be a long struggle, but one that we are committed to
fighting.”
Republicans
appear keen on fighting that struggle as well. But it’s not clear
whether they will be taking direction from the lobby any more.
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