Tag Archives: Hagel

How Obama Beat The Lobby

6 Mar

I am not one for admitting I am wrong but sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming that I have to say it. I was wrong.

I have been repeatedly wrong when I said that the Israel lobby could not be defeated unless and until the President of the United States confronted it directly. In that situation, I always knew the United States would prevail. But I did not understand that a deft president could beat the lobby through indirect means – by quietly using his authority to prevail.

That is what happened when the Obama administration first nominated and then achieved the confirmation of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense.

There, of course, are those who accept the line put out by the lobby, most notably its main component AIPAC, that it was neutral on Hagel.

That is just silly. If AIPAC was neutral, it could have ended the whole battle against him by issuing a statement that it recognized a president’s right to choose his own cabinet. That might not have stopped Republican groups like Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee For Israel or Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition from pursuing its smear campaign against Hagel but it would have stopped the very mainstream American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League from joining the attack. AIPAC’s public silence on a campaign waged by its closest allies demonstrated what it wanted: Hagel’s defeat. So did the fact that it supplied the anti-Hagel senators with the “information” it used to bludgeon him with at his kangaroo court of a confirmation hearing.

President Obama outsmarted the lobby by ignoring it. He knew that if he could get Sen. Chuck Schumer to endorse Hagel, then the game would be over. That is because he, as a Jew and New York’s senior senator, is the de facto head of the lobby’s forces in Congress.

A reflexive lobby man, Schumer might have been expected to oppose Hagel and thereby give a signal to his fellow Democrats that doing so was the only safe position. Had he done that some Democrats would have feared not opposing Hagel. With most Republicans already on record as opposing his nomination, just a shift of a few Democrats would have killed the nomination. Schumer’s announcement in support of Hagel guaranteed that not a single Democrat would oppose him.

So what convinced Schumer to stand with Obama on Hagel? My friends on Capitol Hill, who without exception correctly predicted Schumer’s position, tell me that it was made clear to him that he could not oppose Obama on Hagel and still expect to become leader of Senate Democrats when Harry Reid retires. No threats were made because none needed to be made. Schumer was simply led to understand that he was not getting a pass on this one. Add to that the unprecedented public campaign supporting Hagel. This time the lobby did not have the field to itself. With veterans’ organizations, former Secretaries of State and Defense, and retired generals speaking out in support of the former Nebraska senator, the lobby was out-flanked.

And so Hagel was confirmed. The lobby was defeated. And its friends are devastated.

In a Jewish Tablet piece called, “How AIPAC is Losing” the militant lobby supporter Lee Smith asks “just how powerful is AIPAC if a man who refers to it as the ‘Jewish lobby’ and has defiantly claimed that he is not an “Israeli senator” is slated to be our next secretary of Defense?”

And, most significantly, how much influence does the lobbying organization actually exercise if it can’t carry the day on the single issue that’s been at the very top of its agenda for over a decade: stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Despite an operating budget of more than $60 million, on the most crucial issue facing Israel’s security, AIPAC has lost the policy debate. The winners include those who believe you can’t stop a nation from getting the bomb if it’s determined to do so, those who think the Iranians have a right to nuclear weapons, and those who argue the Iranians can be contained—among them, our new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

In other words, the lobby is not all-powerful. A determined president can defeat it, a lesson Obama will bear in mind in the future, particularly in reference to the lobby’s singular focus on war with Iran.

But will Hagel’s presence make a difference? Who knows? But we do know this: a win is a win. And so is a defeat.

I was wrong. The lobby can be beaten. Obama scared it into public silence and then defeated it. Nice work, work that will only become easier as younger Jews, and the non-Orthodox 90%, continue to abandon a lobby that is at variance with their liberal worldview. Ethnic chauvinism is on the rise in Israel (along with its twin, racism) but not here. Israel’s “demographic problem” can be solved by withdrawing from the occupied areas. The same can’t be said of AIPAC’s problem. Like the Republican Party, its base is growing smaller and narrower every day.

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Praise The Lord: AIPAC Is Losing

15 Jan

The news that Sen. Chuck Schumer will support the Hagel nomination means that Hagel will almost certainly be confirmed as Secretary of Defense.  It does not mean that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not opposing the appointment. It means that, at long last, it has been defeated.

It is obvious why AIPAC  is so insistent that it is not trying to prevent former senator Chuck Hagel from becoming the Secretary of Defense. As investigative journalist Max Blumenthal put it in a piece published yesterday:

AIPAC has good reasons to keep its fingerprints off the public campaign to demonize Hagel. For one, AIPAC thrives on its ability to influence lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, requiring it to avoid alienating the key congressional Democrats who rubberstamp the anti-Palestinian resolutions and Iran sanctions legislation it routinely authors. If AIPAC waded into the Republican-led crusade against Hagel in a public way, it might enrage some of its most reliable Democratic allies in Congress, generating unnecessary acrimony that might complicate future lobbying initiatives.

The other reasons Blumenthal enumerates are AIPAC’s fears of contributing to the bad feelings between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stemming from Netanyahu’s open preference for Mitt Romney in the recent U.S. election.

And then there is AIPAC’s complicated legal status stemming from the fact that, unlike other lobbies for foreign governments, it is not registered as such with the Department of Justice. If it was, its activities would be severely circumscribed. Seeming to lay low, while orchestrating events from behind a screen, makes sense.

AIPAC does not have to issue directives from its headquarters in Washington to convey its desires.

In fact, it usually doesn’t. It never likes to leave fingerprints and still manages to get what it wants because policymakers, media people, etc., know what its preferences are without public pronouncements. This even applies to what AIPAC considers its most significant annual achievement: passage of the $3.5 billion Israel aid package and making sure that there are no strings or conditions attached.

Between 1993 and 1995 I worked for a member of the House Appropriations Committee. That is the body that writes the legislation that provides the money after its Subcommittee on Foreign Operations submits its recommendations which are then quickly approved and, after adoption by the full House and Senate, go to the president for his signature.

Here is how it works. AIPAC provides each staffer on the subcommittee with legislative “language” that spells out precisely what it wants for Israel and the amount of dollars it wants for each provision. The language helpfully arrives in electronic form so the staffer does not have to do anything but drop it into a letter that each legislator writes to the chairman of the committee. Each staffer receives the same “wish list” from AIPAC ensuring that each member of the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations will be requesting the same thing.

Invariably there are extra items to be requested, above and beyond the usual provisions, which  AIPAC hands out as gifts to members of the committee it particularly favors. That member will be the only one asking for this “goody” for Israel and can then claim credit for it. That credit can then be cashed in the form of contributions from donors associated with the lobby for the legislator’s next campaign

The key point is that this is all done in the dark. No member of the Appropriations Committee would ever admit that all they do in crafting the Israel aid package is drop in Israel’s request, as composed and delivered by AIPAC. If a current staffer ever made the mistake of stating publicly that this is how it is done, she would not be a staffer for long. The bottom line is that AIPAC’s direct role is kept secret. In fact, I don’t think anyone has ever described this process until right now.

Achieving passage of the Israel aid package is AIPAC’s most public initiative. Nonetheless, it pretends that the aid legislation simply arises from the will of Congress and the president as a popular manifestation of admiration for Israel.

Needless to say, it does the same thing on its other signature annual achievement: piling sanction after sanction on Iran. It does the same with its lesser efforts like all those resolutions supporting Israel’s wars on Gaza, condemning Palestinian actions and commending Israeli prime ministers for their supposed efforts to achieve peace or combat terrorism. All these arise from AIPAC’s offices, are delivered to Capitol Hill and then are passed with hardly a dissenting voice, all without AIPAC claiming credit for itself. In fact, it invariably hails Congress for doing the work it itself actually did.

So don’t fall for the ridiculous idea that AIPAC is not behind the effort to defeat Chuck Hagel. It almost never operates in the daylight, why would it start now?

Remember, I was the fortunate recipient of the 1982 memo from Steve Rosen, then AIPAC’s deputy director (and subsequently fired by AIPAC after being indicted on an espionage charge) that said the following. Rosen sent it to me on my very first day working at the organization.

It read, in its entirety: “A lobby is like a night flower: It thrives in the dark and dies in the light.”

That is the reason it is operating against Hagel in the dark. Would you expect it to shine a flash light in its self?

No, AIPAC lost. Here is another sign. President Obama is now saying that Netanyahu’s conduct indicates that “ Israel doesn’t know what its best interests are.” It appears that Netanyahu and AIPAC are facing a nightmare: a second term Democratic president who isn’t afraid of the lobby. Stay strong, Mr. President. 

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Obama Crushes AIPAC

9 Jan
In 1983 or thereabouts, during my four year stint at AIPAC, the powerful organization that is the main component of the pro-Israel lobby, I asked Tom Dine, its executive director, if a president of the United States could ever successfully challenge Israel’s behavior even in cases when U.S. national security interests were clearly at stake.

My question related specifically to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that began in 1967 and which seemingly made an Israeli-Palestinian agreement impossible. It also was, as it is now, the primary source of Arab and Muslim anger against the United States.

The reason for my question was my fear that the power of the lobby was such that a president could not prevail against it.

Even matters that did not directly affect Israel like U.S. arms sales to allies like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, would meet massive resistance from Israel, the lobby and its huge chorus of supporters in Congress.

How, I asked Dine, could the United States get ever get Israel to actually yield occupied territory if it became clear that the Arabs were ready for peace, as in fact became the case after the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO?

Dine responded that although he hoped the day would come when Israeli leaders (and hence the lobby) would be ready for “compromise,” he did not think a president could make Israel do anything it didn’t want to do given the power of the organization he led and “our friends in Congress.”

But then he added a caveat: “Of course, if a president pushed hard enough, and told the American people that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was damaging U.S. interests and that he had a plan to end it, he would prevail.”

He elaborated: “By that I mean AIPAC would have no choice but to support him. We can never defeat a president who reaches over the heads of AIPAC and Congress and invokes his prerogatives as president of the United States or, even more, the national interest.

The logic behind Dine’s thinking was simply that American Jews would never allow themselves to be perceived as putting Israel’s interests over America’s because (1) that would be bad for Jews and (2) American Jews are Americans before they are anything else.

It is fine to strongly support the Israeli government even when it is at odds with the U.S. government – but only up to a point. The point is when that support clearly contradicts U.S. interests, as defined by the president.

That is why the lobby was so outraged when Reagan administration officials suggested the lobby’s opposition to an arms sale to Saudi Arabia represented the wrong answer to the question of “Reagan or Begin?” That little phrase – “Reagan or Begin” – won the battle for the administration.

That is why any criticism of the lobby that even hints at the lobby’s putting Israel’s interests above America’s produces such fury, hence the recent hysteria over the use of the term “Israel Firster.”

American Jews will not tolerate the suggestion that they are anything but good Americans. Fighting a president over a national security issue is simply not sustainable.

Although a president’s choice for Secretary of Defense is not in really a national security issue, it does get to the question of an American president and his security prerogatives. After all, the Department of Defense personifies U.S. national security. Once President Obama made clear that he would nominate Hagel, the game was over.

Of course, the lobby claims that it actually did not fight to prevent the naming of Hagel. That is just silly. As someone who worked at AIPAC, in Congress and the State Department for 20 years, I know more than most that, when it comes to the Israel issue, nothing happens without the lobby’s involvement.

AIPAC is, like most professional lobbies, highly protective of its role. Its associates and friends, widely quoted in the media as demanding that Hagel not be appointed, would never have been so aggressive without AIPAC’s go-ahead. That is how it works. It always has.

Frankly, I am surprised that the president went ahead over the lobby’s opposition. I am well-known for my belief that it could not be beaten, although I have always offered the caveat that it would be if a president fought back hard.

Obama did, and Chuck Hagel will almost surely be the next Secretary of Defense.

That is good news but far less significant than the implications for peace. As Dine told me all those years ago, if a president pushes for a peace agreement that advances U.S. interests while not harming Israel’s, he will prevail.

That means that he can insist on an end to the occupation and the creation of a viable Palestinian state in the lands Israel has occupied since 1967. As long as Israel’s security is not put at risk (and no president would put it at risk), the president will prevail. This is especially the case because an end to the occupation (with security guarantees for Israel and the new state) would advance Israel’s security not damage it.

The lobby will not be able to block a president determined to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms fair to both sides. It is like the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, said: “If you will it, it is no dream.”

It is, as Obama demonstrated with Hagel, just a matter of will.

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