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Subject: The Wobbly Israel Lobby;For the Once Potent AIPAC, It's Been a Very Bad
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 09:14:31 EST
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The Wobbly Israel Lobby;For the Once Potent AIPAC, It's Been a
Very Bad Year<By Robert I. Friedman=

IT HAS been such a terrible year for the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the formidable pro-Israel lobby, that
for the first time in recent memory, Jewish community leaders and
Israeli officials are privately questioning the organization's
competence.  Earlier this year, AIPAC led Israel into a nasty
confrontation with Washington. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had
asked the Bush administration for a $10 billion loan guarantee
for absorbing immigrants. When President Bush said he would not
approve a bill authorizing the loans until the Israeli government
stopped building settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank
and Gaza Strip, AIPAC officials mistakenly told Shamir that there
was enough support in Congress to override a presidential veto.
Shamir, who never got the money, was ousted from power by the La-
bor Party last June - in part because he spent badly  funds on
grandiose West Bank settlement projects, rather than on absorbing
the vast influx of Jewish refugees from Ethiopia and the former
Soviet Union.

The loan guarantee fiasco was followed by revelations in the Vil-
lage Voice last August that a unit of AIPAC investigated and
harassed dovish Jewish groups advocating a "land for peace" deal
with the Palestinians.  The AIPAC office, known as Policy
Analysis, also maintained files for the purpose of discrediting
figures such as Jerome Segal of the Jewish Peace Lobby, Jim Zogby
of the Arab American Institute and Jesse Jackson.<The activities
of the office were brought to light by Gregory Slabodkin, a form-
er AIPAC researcher who buttressed his charges with sheaths of
internal documents.

"The mandate of Policy Analysis (formerly Opposition Research) is
to monitor, analyze and respond to anti-Israeli activities in the
United States," the head of the office, Michael Lewis, wrote in
an internal memo in August 1990. "Acting as a clearinghouse for
information on anti-Israel organizations and activists and
through its dissemination of 'Activities' (an AIPAC newsletter),
Policy Analysis provides a resource, and fulfills a need, unre-
plicated anywhere else. . . . "

"Arab Americans are by no means our sole concern," Lewis wrote to
Steven Rosen, AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues, in the
memo. "New Jewish Agenda, the Jewish Peace Lobby and the Jewish
Committee on the Middle East to name but some of the more prom-
inent organizations, were all formed in the past few years . . .

"There is no question that we exert a policy impact, but working
behind the scenes and taking care not to leave fingerprints, that
impact is not always traceable to us."

The Voice expose', which generated headlines in Israel, seemed to
mirror events in the Jewish state itself. In the waning days of
the election campaign last summer, the Likud party had orches-
trated a vituperative campaign designed to discredit as traitors
those seeking compromise with the Palestinians.

If that were not embarrassment enough, the newly elected prime
minister, Yitzhak Rabin, arrived in Washington a few weeks later
and immediately held a private meeting with the AIPAC leadership
in which he excoriated them for steering the Israeli government
into a needless confrontation with Bush over the loan guarantees.

"You've aroused too much antagonism, you keep too many enemies
for yourself and your record is poor," Rabin said, according to
the Hebrew-language daily, Davar. Rabin also sharply criticized
AIPAC's policy of lobbying the executive branch of the American
government, saying that it was the prerogative of Israel. The
prime minister told the AIPAC leaders that, unlike Likud, the La-
bor Party was committed to granting full autonomy to Palestinians
in the occupied territories and warned them not to interfere in
the peace process.<For a lobby that thrived on the perception of
its enormous power, Rabin's criticism was like a blow to the
solar plexus. AIPAC is an organization that prides itself on
clout. (Its lobbyists never tire of pointing out that in 1984,
Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois lost his seat after crossing AIPAC
on one key vote.) All of a sudden, that clout seemed in doubt.
AIPAC was out of step with Israel's patron, the U.S. government,
with much of the liberal-minded American Jewish community and,
most important, with its only client, the new Labor government of
Israel.  AIPAC was established in 1959 by American Zionists to
increase U.S. aid to Israel. In later years, its role expanded to
include lobbying against weapons sales to Arab regimes. Today,
with an annual budget of $15 million and 50,000 dues-paying
members and offices in eight cities outside of Washington, AIPAC
has become a powerful force in Congress, where it rewards faith-
ful legislators.

AIPAC support usually translates into large donations from the
nearly 100 pro-Israel political action committees around the
country. During the 15 years of Likud Party rule in Israel, from
1977 to 1992, many of AIPAC's leaders in Washington came to iden-
tify more and more with Likud's hardline policies. Although AIPAC
has always claimed to be non-partisan, in the 1980s its leaders
did not hesitate to use their muscle to silence legitimate debate
and dissent in the Jewish community, reasoning that criticism of
Israel only helped its enemies. The effect was to support Likud's
vision of Greater Israel.

Emblematic of AIPAC's behavior toward liberal Jews during the
Likud era was its heavy-handed attempt to impose its hawkish
views on the Washington Jewish Week, a paper widely read on Capi-
tol Hill for its incisive political coverage. AIPAC had long
wanted to replace the paper's editor, Andrew Carroll, with some-
one less sympathetic to the Labor Party and more malleable to
AIPAC's influence.

In early 1991, Carroll received a phone call from Toby
Dershowitz, AIPAC's media liaison, who asked him to pull his top
investigative reporter, Larry Cohler, off the AIPAC beat. When
Carroll refused, Dershowitz put AIPAC's chief legal counsel, Da-
vid Ifshin, on the line. Ifshin warned Carroll that he would
reexamine Cohler's previous stories about AIPAC for evidence of
libel.

Nothing ever came of the threat. Soon after, however, AIPAC came
up with something that proved to be even more chilling. In the
spring of 1991, an AIPAC operative attended a picnic in suburban
Washington sponsored by dovish Jewish groups, including Tikkun
magazine, where Carroll delivered some extemporaneous remarks.
Following the event, the AIPAC plant wrote a memo to foreign-
policy issues director Rosen accusing Carroll of identifying with
Israel's detractors. Carroll acknowledges that he criticized
Shamir for being inflexible on the issue of Jewish settlements
but denies his remarks were anti-Israel.

Rosen told me he never talked to Carroll to check the accuracy of
the anti-Israel statements attributed to him in the memo.
Nevertheless, Rosen disseminated the memo widely with the stated
intent of changing the paper's alleged anti-Israel editorial pol-
icy. For example, he shared the memo with Richard Schifter, a
member of the paper's board of directors and a former assistant
secretary of state for human rights.  Schifter's job in the State
Department had been to oversee the preparation of the annual
country-by-country report on human rights. He was constantly at
odds with the U.S. consul in Jerusalem, who accused the neocon-
servative Reagan appointee of watering down evidence of Israeli
cruelty to Arabs.

Schifter subsequently visited Leonard Kapiloff, a personal friend
who owns Washington Jewish Week, and complained about articles he
felt put Israel in a bad light.  Schifter told me he was particu-
larly incensed about a story that gave credence to reports that
Israel was illegally transferring sophisticated American military
technology to Third World despots.

Not long after Schifter's visit, Carroll was demoted from editor
to reporter; rather than stay on, he resigned.  Schifter denies
trying to get Carroll fired; Kapiloff has said Carroll was re-
placed because he was a poor editor. Whatever the case, Washing-
ton Jewish Week ultimately wound up with a new editor, Eric
Rozenman, who is known for hawkish, pro-Likud views and who pre-
viously edited the Near East Report, an AIPAC publication. As for
Richard Schifter, he has become a senior foreign policy adviser
for the Clinton campaign. Schifter, according to the New Repub-
lic, is also working with AIPAC's David Ifshin to bring fellow
neconservatives back into the Democratic Party.

If AIPAC's campaign against the Washington Jewish Week seems ex-
treme, the lobby's response to Rabin's criticism struck observers
as downright irrational. Days after the prime minister criticized
AIPAC, Toby Dershowitz told the Jerusalem Report that Rabin was
"naive" and "doesn't understand how Washington works, and he
doesn't appreciate how important AIPAC is."<Many of AIPAC's re-
cent miscues have been blamed on Rosen, who was in constant con-
tact with Shamir's office during the loan guarantee crisis. Rosen
joined AIPAC in 1982 after a stint as a Middle East analyst at
the Rand Cor. While at Rand, he was the subject of controversy
involving questions as to whether he had used proprietary infor-
mation developed at Rand under government contract in freelance
articles he wrote about Israel. Rosen says he had permission from
his supervisors at Rand to write the pieces. He also says he
promised not to use Rand material, and that he kept his promise.
Whatever the case, a flap ensued in 1981 when the New York Times
described one of Rosen's articles as a Rand product. "The arti-
cles embarrassed Rand and Steve did get called on the carpet,"
said Ann Shobin, a Rand spokesperson. "The article showed bad
judgment on his part."

Former coworkers recall a different personality whose work on the
Middle East reflected his hard-line views.

"For him to move from Rand to AIPAC seemed to be a natural," says
Jerold D. Green, a former Rand intern and now director of the
Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona.
"Rand is in the business of doing objective research and he
wasn't."

The year after Rosen joined AIPAC, the Opposition Research office
published a book, "The Campaign to Discredit Israel," that
described dozens of prominent Jews and non-Jews as antisemites
and enemies of Israel. After criticism from New York Times colum-
nist Anthony Lewis, the office was renamed Policy Analysis and
continued its covert campaign to discredit Israel's critics.

In the controversy ensuing from my Village Voice article last Au-
gust, representatives from the liberal Jewish lobby group Ameri-
cans Friends of Peace Now have had four meetings with AIPAC offi-
cials to discuss broadening the definition of what it means to be
"pro-Israel." Executive Director Tom Dine promised that "Activi-
ties," AIPAC's newsletter that reports on anti-Israeli activi-
ties, would discontinue its practice of lumping together liberal
Jewish critics of Israel's policies with Israel's real enemies.
Peace Now also complained about Rosen's attempts to apply this
tactic to  Andrew Carroll.

"We expressed our utter disapproval of it and it was pretty clear
to me that Dine agreed with us," said a Peace Now delegate.

It remains to be seen if AIPAC, an organization that so
enthusiastically supported the Likud, will use its clout to pro-
mote the policies of a Labor government that is committed to
trading land for peace. One possible clue is found in the Demo-
cratic Party platform on the Middle East, which AIPAC foreign
policy experts helped draft. There is not a single statement sup-
porting land for peace or a settlement freeze, positions that
carried the Labor Party and Rabin into power.

At a recent symposium in Washington, Steven Rosen and AIPAC were
attacked by Yael Dayan, a Labor Party member of the Israeli par-
liament and daughter of the late Moshe Dayan. She accused the
Washington lobby of marginalizing liberal Jews and undermining
the Middle East peace process.

Labor's victory, Dayan said, was a "revolution." It was "not just
a change of government but a change of ideology. Whatever was
planted so carefully and cultivated under the Likud were seeds of
evil for me.  We have no time to waste nurturing plants that bore
so many evils."<

Robert I. Friedman is the author of Zealots for Zion: Inside
Israel's West Bank Settlement Movement, which will be published
this month by Random House.<03:00 11-01

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
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