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"When AIPAC said 'no' to Israel" by Sasha Polakow-Suransky
From time to time, the
Palestine Center distributes
articles it believes will enhance understanding
of the Palestinian political
reality. The following article by Sasha
Polakow-Suransky was published in Foreignpolicy.com
on 29 March 2010. To view
this article online, please go to http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/29/when_aipac_said_no_to_israel.
"When AIPAC said 'no' to
Israel"
By Sasha
Polakow-Suransky
The U.S.-Israel relationship
has entered into a tailspin for the first time
since 1991, when Secretary of State James Baker
refused loan guarantees to Yitzhak Shamir's
Likud government. Now, like then, the issue is
Jewish settlements in areas Israel conquered in
1967. When Israel embarrassed Vice President
Joe Biden on March 9 by announcing the
expansion of an existing East Jerusalem
settlement, the reaction from Israel's friends
in the press and in Washington was swift. New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likened
Benjamin Netanyahu's settler-coddling
government to a drunken driver, Hillary Clinton
scolded Bibi for 45 minutes over the phone, and
pundits across the political spectrum spent an
entire week debating just how grave the current
"crisis" is.
More interesting, however,
is how Israel's self-proclaimed defenders in
Washington have reacted to it. Rather than
maintaining a neutral stance or endorsing the
pro-Israel, anti-settler line espoused by
Thomas Friedman and Hillary Clinton, among
others, AIPAC chose to denounce the Obama
administration in a press release on the eve of
its annual conference, urging Obama "to take
immediate steps to defuse the tension with the
Jewish State" and "make a conscious effort to
move away from public demands and unilateral
deadlines directed at Israel." There was no
mention of Netanyahu's politically inflammatory
expansion of settlements surrounding Jerusalem,
his lack of control over the junior cabinet
officials who announced the construction of
1,600 new housing units while Biden was
visiting, or steps Israel could take to defuse
the crisis.
AIPAC was not always like
this.
In the late 1980s, the pro-Israel
lobby faced a similar dilemma that jeopardized
U.S. military aid to the Jewish state: Israel's
refusal to stop selling arms to South Africa's
racist apartheid regime. Then, unlike now,
AIPAC did not blindly defend the government in
Jerusalem and attack the U.S. administration.
Rather, it pressured the Israeli government to
back down from a myopic and destructive policy
that damaged Israel's image and threatened its
warm ties with Washington.
In August
1986, as popular anti-apartheid legislation was
making the rounds in the U.S. Senate, a
paragraph with far-reaching consequences for
Israel crept into the bill. It called for the
president to document any arms sales to South
Africa and "add the option of terminating U.S.
military assistance to countries violating the
embargo." In Israel, the national-unity
government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir
disregarded the bill, convinced that it would
never pass.
In Washington, though,
leading AIPAC officials believed that Israel's
ties with Pretoria were tarnishing the
country's image in Congress just as the push
for anti-South African sanctions was gaining
momentum on the Hill. And they began pressuring
the Israeli government to act.
Some of
AIPAC's biggest donors were outraged, given
that arms sales to South Africa were a major
economic windfall for Israel. But unlike the
donors, AIPAC's Beltway insiders saw the bigger
strategic picture. In their eyes, the ongoing
and increasingly publicized military
relationship with South Africa was alienating
some of the Jewish state's staunchest
supporters in Congress, who were also committed
to the anti-apartheid cause. Pro-Israel
lobbyists believed that attempts by anti-Israel
groups to paint the Jewish state as an ally of
the racist South African regime would
eventually sway the American public unless
Israel ceased selling arms to South
Africa.
Despite AIPAC's pleas, the
Israelis still refused to take the threat
seriously. In the upper echelons of the Israeli
government, there was a widely held belief that
AIPAC and other Jewish organizations, as well
as friendly members of Congress, would protect
Israel. They were convinced that this threat,
like other bumps in the road, would soon pass.
AIPAC's lobbyists saw plainly that Israel was
shooting itself in the foot, but it would take
a few months before this dawned on leaders in
Jerusalem.
When President Reagan vetoed
the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act on
September 26, 1986, the Israelis felt
vindicated. But Congress immediately overrode
Reagan's veto with overwhelming majorities in
the House and Senate. The Comprehensive
Anti-Apartheid Act became law a week
later--including the amendment threatening to
cut off military aid to Israel. It was a rude
awakening for Shamir, who left the foreign
ministry to take over as Prime Minister on
October 20. He was forced to apologize to the
AIPAC lobbyists, telling them "Your president
told me I didn't have to listen to you." But
now, with the anti-apartheid law on the books,
he did.
Embarrassed by his
miscalculation, Prime Minister Shamir had no
choice but to impose sanctions of his own. As
two leading Israeli journalists argued in the
Washington Post, "Without U.S. military aid,
valued at $1.3 billion this year, Israel could
soon be defenseless, destitute or both."
Shamir's government now saw the threat clearly
and passed a sanctions resolution on March 18,
1987, vowing to sign no new defense contracts
with South Africa. Two weeks later came the
dreaded U.S. report on South Africa's arms
suppliers. It named several European countries
as occasional violators of the arms embargo,
but the focus was on Israel's arms sales.
Damningly, the report's authors concluded, "We
believe that the Israeli government was fully
aware of most or all of the
trade."
Suddenly, American Jewish
organizations were forced to acknowledge an
unsavory relationship they had downplayed and
denied for years and defend Israel's more
pressing interest: ongoing military aid from
Washington. Pro-Israel organizations such as
AIPAC saw the prospect of losing U.S. aid as a
much greater threat to the Jewish state than
cutting ties with South Africa. As the
self-appointed guardians of Israel's interests
in Washington, they told Shamir to make sure
Israel's measures against South Africa were
just as strong as those taken in the United
States and Western Europe--export revenues be
damned.
Such resolve and foresight is
sorely absent today, when AIPAC's reflex is to
denounce the White House rather than quietly
pressuring the Israeli government to abandon
policies that damage its image in Washington
and the rest of America. The pro-Israel lobby
is not stupid; it has correctly judged that
ongoing settlements in greater Jerusalem and
the West Bank are not as politically toxic in
today's Washington as arms sales to a white
supremacist government were in the 1980s. But
its ostensibly pro-Israel line is startlingly
shortsighted. It allows Israel's government to
get away with further settlement expansion that
will eventually do grave harm to Israel's
long-term survival by undermining the two-state
solution.
As with arms sales to
apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, most
clear-eyed observers of the Middle East regard
the settlement enterprise as a public diplomacy
disaster for Israel--not to mention a long-term
strategic liability.
If AIPAC is truly
concerned about Israel's long-term security, it
should be denouncing new settlements and
demanding the dismantlement of existing ones
with even greater fervor than the Obama
administration. If it does not, AIPAC lobbyists
may soon find themselves defending something
far more distasteful than 1600 new homes in
Ramat Shlomo. As Bibi's own defense minister
Ehud Barak acknowledged last month, "as long as
between the Jordan and the sea, there is only
one political entity, named Israel, it will end
up being either non-Jewish or
non-democratic...If the Palestinians vote in
elections, it is a bi-national state, and if
they don't, it is an apartheid
state."
And when that day comes, AIPAC
will have to confront a South African problem
far bigger than the one it faced in
1987.
Sasha
Polakow-Suransky is a Senior Editor at Foreign
Affairs and
the author of the forthcoming book The
Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship
with Apartheid South
Africa.
The
views
expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not necessarily
reflect
those of The Jerusalem Fund.
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