Troubles for the Israel Lobby

By Andrew I. Killgore


	On his first official visit to Washington since his Kadima party won Israel’s March 28 election, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (l) listens as President George W. Bush addresses a joint White House press conference on May 23, 2006 (AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards).

IN 2005, THE online magazine FrontPageMag.com, house organ of David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture, ran an article containing unsettling news for the Israel lobby. Entitled “How the Next Generation Views Israel,” it reported on the results of a poll commissioned by The Israel Project and conducted by Frank Luntz of graduate students at top American universities. When asked their views on Israel, Luntz found the students held harshly negative opinions. (The article has since been removed from the Front Page Web site.)

Luntz’s premise was that the elite graduate students he interviewed would be the leaders of tomorrow—that, in 14 to 20 years, some would be congressmen and senators. The poll results, he warned, indicated that Israel would lose its present political clout in American public opinion.

The FBI investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s principal lobby in Washington, began in April of 1999 and culminated in the Aug. 4, 2005 indictment of Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s then foreign policy chief, and Keith Weissman, its Iran expert. (AIPAC dismissed both after the indictment was handed down.)

Rosen and Weissman are charged with receiving classified U.S. military intelligence from Pentagon Iran expert Larry Franklin and turning it over to Israeli Embassy officers and to journalists. When the FBI raided AIPAC’s headquarters in August 2004, it searched AIPAC’s files and seized a computer hard drive. High-ranking AIPAC officers were summoned to testify before a grand jury by U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty—who was prosecuting the case until he was named deputy U.S. attorney general and sworn in on March 17 of this year. Still, AIPAC has claimed that AIPAC “itself” is not under investigation. This spin is intended to convince Americans that AIPAC should not be required to register as a foreign agent.

AIPAC fears that staff members and neocon fellow travelers may have to answer prosecutors’ questions at the Rosen-Weissman trial that could be extremely damaging to the pro-Israel behemoth. Among the witnesses who may be called on, and questioned, are AIPAC executive director Howard Kohn, managing director Richard Fishman, communications director Renee Rothstein and research director Rafi Dongigar. They will have to be extra careful in their testimony, because former Pentagon analyst Franklin already has pled guilty, and is cooperating with prosecutors.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s neocon former chief of staff, resigned his position after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements in conjunction with the investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name. Libby comes up for trial in the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia in January 2007—after the November 2006 congressional elections.

Another potential witness is neocon Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense. Probably the most hawkish of the “chickenhawks” who pushed for the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussain from power, Wolfowitz is now president of the World Bank. The pro-Israel media are very uneasy about “the father of the Iraq war,” not only because of his many mistakes but also because his appearance at Rosen and Weisman’s trial could further the American public’s slowly building conviction that Israel was the real reason for the disastrous Iraq war.

Douglas Feith is yet another notorious neocon who pushed for the United States to attack Iraq. As former under secretary of defense for policy, Feith created the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which picked the most outlandish pieces of intelligence to “prove” that Saddam Hussain had non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Feith fed this made-up intelligence to Vice President Cheney, who in turn fed it to President Bush.

Feith, described by The Washington Post as “an architect of the Iraqi war” stirred some real anger while under secretary. The Pentagon’s inspector general has promised to provide the Senate Intelligence Committee the results of an investigation of Feith. Since Franklin worked for him, Feith may be called to testify at the Rosen-Weissman trial as well.

More Worries for AIPAC

The disgrace and resignation of Tom DeLay, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives who symbolized the pro-Israel Christian right, also has the Israel lobby worried. DeLay was the highest ranking official who could claim to speak for America’s Christian Zionists, who supported modern Israel as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

Finally, the recent publication by the London Review of Books of “The Israel Lobby,” which is highly critical of the lobby, caught it by surprise. The authors are renowned and highly respected academics John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In very simple, even prosaic, language, Mearsheimer and Walt tell of disproportionate U.S. foreign aid to Israel, of Washington’s dozens and dozens of U.N. vetoes to protect Israel, and of the U.S. actions bound to alienate Arabs and the world’s Muslims.

Mearsheimer and Walt discount the Israeli line that U.S. and Israeli goals are the same, that Americans are fellow victims of terrorism with Israel. Their study makes clear that U.S. support of Israel is the main reason that we are also victims.

AIPAC strategy is to downplay the study in the hope that it will go away. It has not openly answered any of Mearsheimer and Walt’s charges, but it fears a public debate of the issues—with good reason. Should the issues be opened to full debate, the pro-Israel side would lose on the merits.

In fact, the Israel lobby is unable to refute any of the meticulously drafted charges that its work damages American interests. Since it has no answer, it must deploy the despicable “anti-Semitism” accusation—for that is the only “answer” it has.

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

SIDEBAR

Will the Trial of Indicted AIPAC Officers Rosen and Weissman Actually Take Place?

Will the trial of AIPAC’s indicted former foreign policy director Steve Rosen and its indicted former Iran specialist Keith Weissman actually take place? Originally set for January of this year, it was postponed to April 25, then to May 17. On May 5, less than two weeks before the trial was to begin, it was postponed yet again, this time to early August.

The April 24 edition of the conservative Washington Times carried a sympathetic article by Arnaud de Borchgrave analyzing the recent study “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard University’s Stephen Walt. De Borchgrave ended on a chilling note, observing that in early August “Most of the chattering class” will be on vacation, so that “a motion to dismiss” will hardly be noticed.

Attention is focusing on Judge Thomas S. Ellis of the Federal District Court of Alexandria, Virginia where Rosen and Weisman are to be tried. First, in sentencing convicted Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, he made the puzzling comment that Franklin—whom Ellis sentenced to 12 plus years for passing classified military intelligence about Iran and Iraq to Rosen and Weissman and to an Israeli diplomat—had been motivated by a desire to help the United States.

Abbe David Lowell and John Nassikas, lawyers for Rosen and Weissman respectively, are using every trick in the book to delay and obfuscate the case. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaked similar classified information to the defendants, their lawyers alleged. Ellis reportedly has tentatively agreed to subpoena Rice. Also subpoenaed are David Satterfield, deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Baghdad, and Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni.

Other government officials whom the attorneys want to summon include National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and Kenneth Pollack, former national security official and author of The Threatening Storm, which supported the invasion of Iraq. There is no word of Judge Ellis’ decision on these motions, but he has denied requests for testimony from three Israeli diplomats who were the ultimate recipients of stolen U.S. secrets. Ellis’ apparent acquiescence to this blizzard of requests from their defense lawyers leaves the impression that Rosen and Weissman were engaging in legitimate lobbying activities and merely exercising their freedom of speech.

According to earlier reports, Rice was told about the FBI investigation of AIPAC soon after President George W. Bush began his first term, in early 2001. Knowing that an FBI investigation was underway, she is unlikely to have revealed anything of substance to Rosen or Weissman. This lends weight to the suspicion that the AIPAC duo’s defense lawyers are attempting to summon Rice purely for show.

Despite their maneuverings, however, the case against AIPAC appears to be on solid ground. The FBI was eavesdropping on Rosen in April 1999, when he disclosed codeword-protected intelligence to an Israeli official. This was during the presidency of Bill Clinton, who must have approved it. The investigation continued, apparently with the approval of President Bush, for at least four more years. And the FBI went after the top AIPAC official, Steve Rosen.

If he is convicted and goes to prison, we should have a much weakened AIPAC—and a much more secure intelligence system.—A.I.K.