Let’s get past this U.S.-Israel relationship thing, so we can get on with important stuff, like the U.S.-Israel relationship.
That seemed to be the message at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, held May 22-24.
With a record 10,000 people and both the U.S. and Israeli leaders in attendance — plus 67 U.S. senators and 286 members of the U.S. House of Representatives at the gala dinner on May 23 — this AIPAC parley was the biggest and in many ways the most impressive ever.
After the bickering between President Barak Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the month, AIPAC leaders strove to focus on what they had hoped would be the conference headline-makers:
• Yanking the public’s attention back to Iran after months of distraction by the “Arab Spring” — the recent spate of anti-government demonstrations and violence in dictatorial Arab nations.
• Bludgeoning the Palestinian Authority with the threat of isolation if it presses its inclusion of Hamas and its quest for statehood recognition at the United Nations in September.
The other agenda item for the AIPAC crowd was trying to make sense of how to foster support for Israel in a U.S. electorate that is changing more rapidly and dramatically than it has in generations.
Lee Rosenberg, AIPAC’s president, described for the convention the realities posed by a Congress that has turned over by a third in two years.
“Capitol Hill is no longer a place of entrenched incumbency,” Rosenberg said. “Knowledge and institutional memory — gone! Continuity — gone! Relationships — gone!”
Those elements for decades had been the basis of AIPAC’s success in cultivating long-term relationships. They have been jeopardized by the Tea Party insurgency.
AIPAC insiders and conference speakers said the lobbying group has little to fear from the Republican Party’s conservative wing, which has embraced the party’s pro-Israel posture.
Nonetheless, the massive turnover in Congress hinders efforts to form the lasting relationships that get AIPAC activists into the door and give their priorities a hearing.
Those relationships are key to getting the lobby’s preferred bills introduced — and as usual, many of these were rushed to the floor in the days before the conference. The bills appeared in the kits that the AIPAC attendees picked up at registration.
One bill, under consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives and likely to appear soon in the Senate, would tighten Iran sanctions that already were enhanced less than a year ago.
The newest bill would expand sanctions against Iran’s financial institutions, target human rights abusers, facilitate assistance to democracy activists, and reduce to $5 million from $20 million the minimum amount in annual trade with Iran’s energy sector that would invite sanctions.
The other legislative initiatives that the conference’s attendees were slated to raise during their annual lobbying day May 24 — when thousands of activists had conversations with their senators and congressional representatives — are nonbinding resolutions in both houses that call on the Obama administration to review assistance to the Palestinian Authority in light of its pact with Hamas and U.N. initiative for statehood.
The lobbying group also was focused on maintaining current levels of aid for Israel at $3 billion a year, and of sustaining foreign aid in general.
Republicans and Tea Party leaders mostly have committed themselves to sustaining those levels of assistance; but they want to slash foreign aid.
AIPAC insiders oppose separating Israel aid from the regular foreign assistance package, saying it would undercut friendliness to Israel overseas and make Jews at home vulnerable to claims of special treatment.
In a video shown at the conference’s start, Ester Kurz, AIPAC legislative director, made clear that AIPAC’s agenda encompasses all foreign aid.
“Foreign aid is only 1 percent of our budget and virtually all of that is spent here at home,” she said.
Rosenberg, the lobby’s president, said sustaining support for Israel faced a threefold challenge:
• Populations were shifting to the South and West, meaning more change in Congress and to states with fewer Jews.
• Congress was turning over more rapidly than ever.
• Political giving is not growing in the pro-Israel community.
“The number of pro-Israel Americans contributing to those campaigns has not increased,” he said. “It is not sustainable.”
AIPAC, Rosenberg said, is now training its activists to be political givers. It was not enough to fund the lobby; activists must fund candidates.
A succession of activists then crossed the stage, recounting their journeys from apathy to deep political involvement.
Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s executive director, told the conference that it was critical to get across the AIPAC message, particularly on Iran, because world attention to the Middle East has been sapped by the Arab Spring.
“In January and February, we had momentum when it came to Iran,” Kohr said. “Then the Arab demonstrations began and the focus shifted.
“Nations everywhere began dealing with the very legitimate challenges and problems that the turmoil presented, and suddenly the world was not talking about Iran with the same sense of clarity and purpose.”
He went on, “We must refocus our policymakers’ attention on what Iran is doing in this time of turmoil: its efforts to cultivate fifth columns in neighboring nations to advance Iranian ends, its use of terror by proxy, its relentless march toward a nuclear weapon.”
Kohr clearly did not want that agenda clouded by the recent Obama-Netanyahu contretemps.
On May 19, in a Middle East policy speech at the State Department, Obama had said that it was the U.S. position that Israeli-Palestinian peace would be negotiated on the basis of the pre-1967 lines, with land swaps. Netanyahu immediately countered that those lines were “indefensible.”
Three days later, addressing AIPAC on May 22, Obama made clear that by “definition” any Israeli-Palestinian border would be “different” than the 1967 lines. Netanyahu said he “appreciated” the distinction.
That was good enough for Kohr, who praised Obama’s role in advancing AIPAC initiatives.
“It is so important that America and Israel work out whatever differences arise between them privately, and when tensions do arise that the leaders work together to close those gaps,” he said on May 23. “The president’s speech to us yesterday reflected just such an effort to close those gaps.”
Netanyahu, in his speech to the lobby on May 23, also went out of his way to put the matter behind him, praising Obama.
“President Obama has spoken about his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security,” he said. “He rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented. He spoke of that commitment not just in front of AIPAC, but in two speeches heard throughout the Arab world. And President Obama has backed those words with deeds.”
That didn’t stop the politicking, nor did it assuage an AIPAC crowd still shell-shocked from the bitterness earlier.
Obama earned warm applause for his condemnations of Iran, call to free captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, denunciations of Hamas and vows of America’s commitment to Israel.
But the applause for the president wasn’t as loud as the applause later in the day for Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House majority leader.
When Cantor, hours after Obama’s AIPAC speech, told the conference crowd that the root of the conflict was Arab hatred of Israel and Jews and “not the ‘67 lines,” he received a 40-second standing ovation. It may have been the biggest cheer of the conference.
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