I’m Facebook friends with a really smart guy named Joe Katz, who shares my discomfort with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has so much power in Washington. It’s downright disgusting to see politicians of both parties – from the POTUS on down – pay such homage to AIPAC and treat its annual conference as the Event of the Season.
Katz – who teaches Hebrew and Judaic studies to fourth and seventh graders at his local synagogue, Beth Sholom Temple – is a senior at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He used to be a die-hard Zionist until he spent a month with right-wing Jewish settlers in the West Bank several years ago. Since then, he’s come to oppose all forms of nationalism and any attempt to demonize Israelis or Palestinians. He told me he’s long been concerned about the damage AIPAC is doing to the United States and our Jewish community. I asked him to expound on this statement for “What’s the Diehl?” readers. Here’s his blistering guest post:
Everyone who cares has long been familiar with the fact that AIPAC distorts American foreign policy in ways that hurt our interests. And just in case anyone couldn’t figure that out on their own, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer broke the story wide open a few years ago with their excellent book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. It’s also pretty well known, especially in the Jewish community, that AIPAC has a militarist, expansionist, right-wing agenda that endangers Israel as much, if not more, than the United States. What is less well known, however, is the degree to which AIPAC’s agenda damages the Jewish community here in America.
Though this issue has gone almost entirely unmentioned in both the mainstream and alternative press, it is a major problem with many facets that deserves to have book after book written about it. I’ll try to keep my criticism of the AIPAC agenda limited to its affect on Jewish organizations that aren’t, and shouldn’t be, overly concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s because a great example of it fell into my lap yesterday when I opened my e-mail and saw this message from the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC):
Next Monday, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is expected to vote to accept Palestine as a full member. Under legislation passed by Congress 15 years ago, this will trigger an automatic cutoff of U.S. funding, wreaking havoc with many of the agency’s programs.
The United States funds around 22 percent of the UNESCO budget – around $70 million a year. So far, the Palestinians have refused to step back. They hope to have holy sites, like the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Joseph’s tomb in Nablus and Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, declared as wholly Palestinian heritage sites. It is all part of their campaign to erase the historical Jewish bond to the Land of Israel.
Let's remember that the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, according to the Book of Genesis Chapter 23, was bought by Abraham as a burial place for his wife, Sarah. It is the burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Leah. Centuries later, Muslims built a mosque on the site.
UNESCO could be just the start of a process. The Palestinians will almost certainly go from agency to agency seeking membership – the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, the International Criminal Court and even the International Atomic Energy Agency. This last truly represents the nightmare scenario for Washington which could conceivably find itself effectively forced to pull out of the very agency that is taking the lead in monitoring Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program.
Already there was a vote on the issue at the executive committee level where the vote was 40-4 against America and Israel. Many of the countries that voted against the United States, including 12 of the 13 African nations on the committee, get sizable foreign aid from the U.S. taxpayer.
Please click here to use our automated system to send a letter to your elected officials so that Americans understand how dangerous and damaging this Palestinian move has become to poor people around the world, religious freedom and to U.S. interests. Please try to use your own words as much as possible in urging them to make clear to the world that responsibility for this move lies entirely with the Palestinian leadership.
Now, getting e-mails from Jewish organizations encouraging me to “take a stand” against Palestinian self determination is nothing new. In fact, I get them almost every day. This one kind of surprised me though, because usually when I get e-mails from the JCRC they have to do with environmental justice, fighting poverty, standing up for immigrants’ rights, etc. You know, basic stuff that appeals to religious Jews who understand the lessons of the Torah, as well as secular Jews like myself who are familiar with our people’s pre-WWII history as oppressed, poor immigrants forced into ghettos filled with toxic waste.
But that’s exactly why groups like the JCRC are so useful, and I would even say necessary, for AIPAC. AIPAC does a pretty good job of keeping vital information about Israel’s behavior from the American Jewish community. But just keeping information away from Jews doesn’t inspire anyone to organize a protest, to write letters or call senators, or to go on Facebook and demonize anyone who criticizes Israel. That requires subsidiary organizations who can build trust with the community by fighting for issues that actually appeal to Jews, most of whom are liberal or left leaning and not nationalistic or militaristic. Furthermore, most Jews are extremely critical of the U.S. government but obviously don’t hate Americans, so the idea that critics of Israel hate Jews strikes most of us as absurd on its face. In other words, the right wing AIPAC lacks the credibility to persuade liberal Jews to pursue its agenda, so it relies on intermediary organizations like the JCRC to do the dirty work for it.
How far down the AIPAC path the JCRC plans to go has yet to be seen, but we can make some predictions based on another organization that was assimilated by the AIPAC agenda decades ago. I’m talking about the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, an organization that once did phenomenal work that benefited American Jews and non-Jews alike. The ADL used to be known for going after the KKK, neo Nazis, and other bigots. It distributed curricula to public schools to help them teach about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, and it provided legal assistance to people of all faiths who felt they had been the victims of religious or ethnic discrimination. On top of all this, as its name implies, it did great work combating real anti-Semitism all over the country.
Through this work, the ADL built a reputation in the Jewish community as a liberal organization that fought for real American and Jewish values, namely religious freedom and opposing discrimination. And that’s why AIPAC just HAD to have the ADL on its team. There was no way the right wingers at AIPAC could convince liberal Jews that anti-Zionism was equivalent to anti-Semitism. But the ADL could. Jews trusted the ADL, and so did a lot of people from other ethnic groups. If one of the leading warriors against racism said Israel’s critics were bigots, it was bound to get attention – and legitimacy – in Jewish circles and the mainstream media. So AIPAC courted the ADL, and over the years the ADL turned its attention away from issues of racism and real anti-Semitism and diverted most of its resources toward smearing Israel’s critics as anti-Semitic. Now, the organization that used to be known for suing racist groups into bankruptcy is better known for denying the Armenian genocide and leading the fight against Muslim Americans who wanted to build a mosque in New York City. The damage done to American Jews and other minorities who used to look to groups like the ADL for support is incalculable.
AIPAC used the ADL’s legitimacy to convince millions of people that critics of Israeli war crimes were anti-Semitic, and now it is looking to use groups like the JCRC to get another victory for Israel’s government, at the expense of American and Israeli Jews. AIPAC has long dreamed of convincing Americans that Israel actually has one of the most humanitarian and compassionate governments in the world. With limited success, they have aggressively distributed accurate information about the commitment of many Israelis to environmental justice, Israel’s expansive programs to help its poor citizens (of which there are many), its commitment to higher education, and especially the incredible achievements of Israeli scientists when it comes to medical and green technology and pharmaceutical innovation. While these efforts have surely filled many Jews with pride, AIPAC has understandably had trouble translating these achievements in fighting poverty and disease into a justification for supporting the right-wing, militarist, and imperialist policies of Israel’s government.
It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that AIPAC is hoping groups like the JCRC will be able to fill that gap for them. Just as the ADL once had credibility on the issue of racism, the JCRC, the Jewish Center for Public Affairs, the American Jewish World Service, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and many others have credibility with liberal Jews – or as I call them, “Jews” – when it comes to poverty, the environment, health care and human rights. And just as AIPAC’s corruption of the ADL was devastating to American Jews and other minority communities, AIPAC’s corruption and essential destruction of Jewish anti-poverty groups will have a similarly devastating impact on American Jews, the poor, immigrants and the environment.
I hope the e-mail I received yesterday will prove to be an anomaly and that the JCRC will go back to fighting for economic and social justice. Of course, I support much more revolutionary solutions to our country’s problems, but we desperately need groups like the JCRC fighting to keep the social programs we already have while the rest of us work for permanent, systemic change. But one thing is certain: That e-mail cannot be viewed as any kind of “natural” Jewish reaction to an event that some perceive to be threatening to the Jewish state. It is the result of a concerted effort by AIPAC and its subsidiaries to control the conversation about Israel within the Jewish community as much as it does within the mainstream media and the halls of Congress.
More importantly, to Jews anyway, it is the result of AIPAC’s agenda to turn every single Jewish organization in this country into a robotic arm of the right wing of the Israel lobby, and to get American Jews to forget about the parts of our culture and history that have won us so much respect in American society – our commitment to ending poverty, achieving justice, repairing the environment and stopping racism. When viewed in this light, I think it is clear that AIPAC poses much more of a threat to the Jewish people than some UN resolution recognizing that the Palestinians have the same rights as everyone else.
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