Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the J Street National Conference
At Monday night’s gala for J Street—the anti-Bibi, pro-Israel, pro-peace, two-state-solution organization—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “It’s in the DNA of many of us to support the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Above all, hers was a call for “bipartisan” support and not politicizing policy toward the Jewish state. And yet, though dozens of members of Congress were in attendance, there was not a single Republican member there. The Trump administration did not send a representative to J Street, as the previous administration had.
Let it be known there is nothing bipartisan about how Israel policy is handled in Washington.
Indeed, the Prospect can confirm that as J Street was meeting, Trump’s top Middle East appointee at the State Department was, in fact, speaking about Israel and Palestine yesterday, but on the other side of town.
The board of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—J Street’s chief rival on the congressional Israel-policy front and a bastion of support for the government and policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—was treated to off-record remarks by David Schenker, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs. Neither the State Department nor AIPAC released a readout of the meeting.
At AIPAC’s 2019 annual conference, the Trump administration sent 17 emissaries, notably including Vice President Mike Pence and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
We may never know what Schenker, a former fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), said to the members of AIPAC’s board on Monday, but it’s no surprise he addressed them, particularly since WINEP is the progeny of the Israel-lobbying powerhouse AIPAC.
Schenker, a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld and a onetime diplomatic critic of Trump’s foreign policy, was sworn in to the long-vacant assistant secretary post in June. Having directed WINEP’s Arab affairs initiative from 2006 to 2019, Schenker is a known Washington commodity on the punditry and op-editry circuit.
WINEP, however, is anything but a just-the-facts think tank. In a 2011 report on post-revolution Egypt, for example, Schenker devoted ink to Iranian influence in Cairo but perhaps strategically avoided discussing Saudi Arabia. His writing often cheerleads for the Kingdom of Jordan as an important security partner, fear-mongers about Hezbollah in Lebanon (and the specter of Iranian influence in the country), and derides actors on the spectrum of political Islam. In a compartmentalization typical of Beltway think tanks, he has managed to analyze Egypt’s security situation without mentioning President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s brazen and systematic assault on human rights and freedoms. Most analysts will tell you that widespread regime torture, indiscriminate arrests, and human rights abuses are a source of radicalization.
WINEP has provided key Middle East personnel to the Trump administration, including the State Department Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS James Jeffrey and National Security Council Syria officer Andrew Tabler.
Republicans have never been shy about politicizing Middle East policy. Trump attorney and now-Ambassador Friedman, before his assignment in Israel, called J Streeters “capos.” Rhetoric like that exposes the stark reality: There is no bipartisan consensus on Israel, Palestine, or the broader region. What there is is a fearful asymmetry: Democratic presidential candidates are obliged to speak at AIPAC’s annual confab, while the GOP can’t be bothered to show up at J Street.
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One might say that the only bipartisan moment at Monday’s J Street gala came when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, long skeptical of the left-leaning lobbying group, took the stage.
