Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Then–Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the 2016 AIPAC Policy Conference at the Verizon Center, March 21, 2016, in Washington.
AIPAC has been in the news lately, and not in a good way. After decades of pretending that it would not know a political contribution if it bumped into one and broke its nose, it ended the charade and announced in December 2021 that it would be creating a super PAC to donate directly to congressional candidates. Having raised nearly $16 million in its first quarter of existence, it has now endorsed 109 of the 147 Republican congressmen who supported Donald Trump’s campaign to try to overturn the Electoral College’s results on January 6th, along with a few Democrats. “Our goal is to make America’s friendship with Israel so robust, so certain, so broadly based, and so dependable that even the deep divisions of American politics can never imperil that relationship and the ability of the Jewish state to defend itself,” it explains.
In a Boston Globe op-ed by Alan Solomont and Nancy Buck (both associated with J Street), however, we learn that “AIPAC’s new endorsees include such allies of Donald Trump as Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who refuses to cooperate with the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol; Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, who met with ‘Stop the Steal’ leaders just days before the insurrection; and Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who has echoed white nationalist conspiracies about ‘replacement theory’ and compared Democratic leaders to the Nazis.”
And guess which Republican AIPAC apparently forgot to include? That’s right. The rather crazily “pro-Israel” Liz Cheney is being blackballed. In the past, Cheney has taken the AIPAC line down the line. Even before she was in Congress, she represented the Republican Party at an AIPAC Policy Conference panel and (falsely) complained of Obama: “There is no president who has done more to delegitimize and destabilize the State of Israel in recent history than President Obama.” She also attacked Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, in a manner consistent with AIPAC’s attacks on them. But now, apparently because she’s become persona non grata with the people out to destroy American democracy, she’s getting stiffed.
Cheney is understandably pissed, accusing AIPAC’s leadership of “playing a dangerous game of politics.” AIPAC’s behavior has also angered many people who would normally be inclined to march in step with it. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, termed AIPAC’s list “morally bankrupt and short-sighted.” Even former Anti-Defamation League leader Abe Foxman could not stomach it, calling the endorsements a “sad mistake.”
Given that a mere 4 percent of American Jews, in 2022, put Israel at the top of their list of concerns (and they are divided on the issue), and that the vast majority voted for Joe Biden and oppose Trump and the Republicans, what AIPAC shamelessly calls its “United Democracy Project” is clearly not only undermining its bona fides as a supporter of American democracy; it is also renouncing whatever claim it had to represent the values, and interests, of American Jewry.
Then again, it’s not as if AIPAC, its allies in Congress, and the rest of the world of establishment Jewish organizations can claim to care about democracy inside Israel, either. After all, there can be no argument that the laws under which the Palestinians are forced to live in the West Bank are even remotely subject to democratic rule. Did you know, for instance, that if a West Bank Palestinian marries an Israeli Arab citizen, they are not allowed to move in with their spouse inside the Green Line? And did you also know that at Palestinian universities faculty are not allowed to invite speakers to their classes who are not preapproved by Israel’s minister of defense? This past February, the Israeli occupation authorities quietly issued a new 97-page ordinance called “Procedure for Entry and Residence for Foreigners in Judea and Samaria Area,” (which is what Israel calls the West Bank) demanding that “Foreign-passport holding Palestinians must provide information—for visa purposes—on an application for approval prior to travel, which includes the names and national ID numbers of “first-degree” relatives, or other non-relatives with whom they may stay or visit.” This article notes that the rules also “complicate and formalise written and unwritten entry restrictions for foreigners wishing to visit, do business, reunite and reside with their Palestinian families, work or volunteer in the West Bank, or study or teach at Palestinian academic institutions.” These are actually relatively minor examples recently in the news. One could list the hundreds of ways in which Palestinians are not allowed to exercise the same rights that extend not only to Israelis but also to settlers.
It’s not as if AIPAC, its allies in Congress, and the rest of the world of establishment Jewish organizations can claim to care about democracy inside Israel, either.
Yet the vast majority of establishment Jewish organizations in the United States, including but hardly limited to AIPAC, are spearheading legislation to demand that both the federal government and state authorities treat the West Bank as indistinguishable from Israel. For instance, last month Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) introduced legislation prohibiting participation in boycotts or requests for boycotts of “a country which is friendly to the United States” that are “enforced by foreign governments or international organizations.” It includes a section to prevent “U.S. citizens and companies and federal and state governments from providing information to foreign governments and international organizations that assist boycotts of friendly countries.”
OK, that’s anti–free speech and all, but it also insists that the legislation label the U.N. Human Rights Council’s creation of a database of companies doing business in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights as an act of BDS. “Too many, even in the halls of Congress, have emboldened antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric by accepting the BDS movement,” Zeldin said. “This legislation not only reinforces congressional opposition to the BDS movement but protects American companies from being forced to provide information to international organizations that peddle this hate-filled movement and holds those who attempt to violate that protection accountable.” (Much the same law was introduced in 2018 by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Rob Portman (R-OH), and earned 58 Senate co-sponsors—42 Republicans, 15 Democrats, and one independent—and 292 House co-sponsors—216 Republicans and 76 Democrats. Another earlier version was introduced by Zeldin in 2020, when it enjoyed 63 Republican co-sponsors and one Democrat, and died in committee. I wrote of my opposition to both BDS as well as these laws here.)
Recall that last year, the liberal ice cream impresarios Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield announced that they would no longer allow their ice cream to be sold in the occupied territories, though it remained widely available across Israel itself. In doing so, they spoke in the traditional terms of American liberal Zionists. Describing themselves as “proud Jews” and “supporters of the State of Israel,” they said they simply wished to voice their opposition both to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which targets all of Israel, and to an Israeli policy that “perpetuates an illegal occupation that is a barrier to peace and violates the basic human rights of the Palestinian people who live under the occupation.”
And yet in his recent book, It Could Happen Here, Jonathan Greenblatt, who replaced Foxman as the ADL’s CEO, termed Cohen and Greenfield’s decision “an insidious effort to delegitimize the Jewish state.” Pro-Israel lobbyists have demanded—and won—divestment from whatever investments countless states hold in their pension funds in the ice cream company’s parent company, Unilever. These and other punitive actions were taken because the two men took a position that Israel and the occupied territories should be treated as separate entities—that the West Bank was not “Israel,” and vice versa. They did so, moreover, at a moment when most Americans, including 58 percent of American Jews, wanted the United States to restrict its aid to Israel to prevent it from being spent on settlements.
Never mind that, though, according to William Daroff, CEO of the 53-member Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group for mainstream Jewish leaders. “With Ben & Jerry’s, it’s not just about Unilever,” he explained in a February interview. “It’s about every other multinational company that may come under pressure from fringe elements. And we want them to see the tsuris … that’s the technical term—that has been caused for Unilever in state capitals, where 33 states have effected some sort of action to push back against boycott, divestment and sanctions.”
In other words, their purpose was clear: intimidation.
Never mind, also, that you can still buy Ben & Jerry’s pretty much everywhere in Israel today. It is only in the West Bank where it has been withdrawn. So the only way you can complain about a boycott of “Israel”—much less bigotry, etc.—is if you believe there is no distinction to be made between Israel and its occupied territories. And if you believe that, well, you can’t possibly argue that Israel is a democracy. In fact, there’s a word defined in the 1988 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court that defines “inhumane acts” undertaken “in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Want to guess what that word is?
Odds and Ends
Are you depressed by the Games People Play with lies and political disinformation like those described above? Are you worried that there Ain’t No Sunshine when comes to the future of U.S. democracy (or Middle East peace, or climate action, or economic inequality, or even this damn virus) and that everything worthwhile in this country might just Drift Away? Then, friends, do what I do and Say a Little Prayer.
