Uncovering Congress's Dangerous Addiction to Pro-Israel PACs

By Andrea W. Lorenz

In the Jan. 25, 1993 issue of the Nation, Micah L. Sifry takes exception to some of the conclusions of a recent report by the Anti-Defamation League on "anti-Semitism in America." "Criticism of Israel, it turns out, is no predictor for anti-Semitic attitudes," the Nation editor points out. "In fact, many critics of Israeli policy are well educated, follow foreign affairs closely and embrace tolerant, pluralistic attitudes at home."

Given such enlightened, and not at all uncommon, attitudes on the part of American Jews, why are so many members of Congress loath to criticize Israel when it disregards international law and denies basic human rights to the Palestinians under its occupation? I found the answer only after I accepted an assignment to compile reports filed with the Federal Election Commission of exactly how much money pro-Israel political action committee (PACs) gave to candidates running for Congress in 1992.

As a new writer for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, I approached the assignment in March 1992 with healthy skepticism. When dealing with any aspect of the Arab-Israeli issue, loaded as it is with emotion, one can only maintain credibility by not accepting what one is told on its face value and by constantly checking the facts. After all, I knew political action committees were a part of the American political landscape. They represent everything from ice cream manufacturers to the National Rifle Association. Teachers have PACs, gays have PACs, pro-lifers and pro-choice groups have PACs. Wasn't the issue of pro-Israel PACs wielding too much influence being blown out of proportion?

The importance of my research, according to Richard Curtiss's book Stealth PACs, in the fourth edition of which the figures I was gathering eventually would appear, is that federal law limits any one PAC to a contribution of no more than $5,000 to a candidate in a primary election and another $5,000 in the general election. Therefore, theoretically, no special interest could use its PAC to donate more than $10,000 to any individual candidate during a two-year election cycle. With 55 pro-Israel PACs actively supporting Israel, however, as was the case in the 1992 cycle, they would have the ability to outspend any other special interest.

But, I thought, if they had been doing this ever since 1978, as claimed in the book, wouldn't I have read about it somewhere else? I trekked down to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and, with the help of a patient federal employee, I followed instructions left by my predecessor for collecting information from reports to the commission by 116 pro-Israel PACs listed in the book.

I discovered that only three of those PACs had names referring in any way to the Middle East. Names of the others referred either to good government, their geographic location in the United States, or both. Thus the author had dubbed them "Stealth PACs," and turned their innocuous names into an initial guide to identifying their true purpose.

The fact is that virtually no other kind of PAC adopts an innocuous name. After all, it is to any PAC's advantage to attract like-minded donors, and to be sure that the candidate knows why its campaign contribution was made. It struck me that there must be a reason for pro-Israel PACs to adopt such misleading names. Could it be to conceal from the public the existence of so many of them?

Still, I knew that not every innocuously named PAC existed to support U. S. aid to Israel. There was, for example, a PAC called "Emily's List" organized to support women candidates. How could I satisfy myself that the 116 PACs on the list, with names like Gold Coast PAC, Heartland PAC, and Badger PAC, were pro-Israel PACs? Why not call them up and ask them, just to be sure?

Since I already had discovered a new PAC, one not listed in the 1991 version of Stealth PACs, but which followed the donation patterns of those that were listed, I decided to start with it. I called the telephone number listed in Washington, DC for "Actionpac."

On my first call, I was told "Laurie' would call me back. After I left two more messages asking her to return my call, she did. She told me, however, that she was sorry but she could not tell me the purpose of Actionpac, or what kind of candidates it supported.

The spokesperson for only one of the several innocuously named PACs I called, Capital PAC, was candid about the PAC's pro-Israel stance. In that case, however, what he said was hardly news. I'd already seen Capital PAC described in Jewish weekly newspapers as one of the pro-Israel PACs.

In fact, election-year reading of such weeklies as Washington Jewish Week and the Forward, and the daily reports of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, made clear which candidates the leaders of AIPAC and other national Jewish organizations were supporting. They were the same candidates to whom Actionpac, Capital PAC, and others on my list were donating.

How very effective all of this turned out to be is illustrated by political columnist Douglas Bloomfield, who wrote in the Jan. 14 Washington Jewish Week: "There is good news from Capitol Hill for pro-Israel forces. . ." He noted that 32 Jewish representatives had been elected to the House alone, and "Israeli defense and intelligence officials cannot help but be pleased with changes at the top of the two select committees on intelligence."

Bloomfield dubbed the eight Jewish Democratic and two Jewish Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee a minyan, the Hebrew term for the quorum of 10 adult male Jews required for communal worship. Checking my list, I found that all but one had received campaign donations from PACs on my "pro-Israel" list. Whatever the motives of the PACs, it was clear from Bloomfield's article that he, at least, had concluded that for these PAC-supported representatives Israel's interests would be placed above all others, including those of the United States.

So, a guide to identifying a pro-Israel PAC is not its name but its pattern of giving. Exceptions to that rule are "multi-issue" pro-Israel PACs. Multi-issue PACs give to Democrats but usually not to Republicans who are "right" on Israel. Their rationale is that in addition to support for Israel there are other issues equally important to their donors, such as support for abortion rights and opposition to prayer in schools. An interesting aspect of this pattern is that when faced with a pro-Israel incumbent and a pro-Israel challenger, as happens when a House member challenges a senator for the senator's seat, most pro-Israel PACs (but not necessarily the multi-issue PACs) give to the incumbent. This applies even if the pro-Israel incumbent is not Jewish, and the pro-Israel challenger is. Thus, when a member of Congress supports aid for Israel, the pro-Israel PACs will go all out to help that incumbent against all challengers.

In the course of my research, I noticed that the Hollywood Women's PAC donations in the current cycle did not follow the pattern of the "multi-issue" pro-Israel PACs, although in previous elections it had appeared to be one. When I called to check they said they had decided that their first priority was to support women and pro-choice candidates, and that support of Israel was not as important. I therefore removed that PAC from the list of pro-Israel PACs active in the 1992 election cycle.

The final stage of my epiphany came when I had painstakingly entered all of the figures from individual pro-Israel PAC reports into the computer database and started adding them up. As the totals popped up on my screen, I could hardly believe my eyes—$108,000 in the current cycle to former Rep. Mel Levine (D-CA), who nevertheless lost in the Democratic senatorial primary election, and $382,630 since 1978 to Sen. Thomas Daschle (D-SD).

The 55 pro-Israel PACs that were active in the 1991-92 election cycle had contributed more than two and a half million dollars in critically important "early money" to pro-Israel candidates by June 30, 1992. By the end of the cycle, they had contributed $3,963,007 to 403 candidates, 281 of them Democrats and 122 of them Republicans.

This was an aspect of the U.S. political system that my history, political science and civics teachers had never explained. It began to dawn on me that many congressional candidates received from PACs enormous amounts of money for their reelection campaigns—enough to feed whole villages in the Third World for several months. Some of these staggering sums were listed in the daily newspapers.

However, one will not learn the true story about the pro-Israel PACs by reading most newspapers. For example, on June 8, Washington Post investigative reporter Charles Babcock reported the amounts contributed through March 31, 1992 by the nation's top 50 PACs. National PAC, the only pro-Israel PAC on his list, was 41st in his ranking of PACs by the size of their donations. Its then total of $331,000 in donations put it below the PACs of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and the United Steelworkers of America. That made pro-Israel contributions seem almost insignificant in terms of the big picture.

However, when I totaled donations to candidates by all of the pro-Israel PACs active by March 31, 1992, the figure was $2,020,983. That made the pro-Israel total nearly twice that of the heaviest hitter, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which had given $1,366,720 by March 31.

According to the FEC, it is not illegal for PACs representing the same issue to give to the same candidate, even though the savings and loan industry is the only other special interest to spawn such a proliferation of PACs, and they do not have deceptive names. What is illegal is for the direction of a group of PACs to come from one source. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel's Washington, DC lobby, denies providing donation guidelines to the pro-Israel PACs. Nevertheless, the giving patterns of those PACs—many of which were established by current or former AIPAC members—are remarkably predictable.

Conscience or Contributions?

Do members of Congress who receive pro-Israel PAC money follow their consciences when it comes to decisions regarding Israel? It seems doubtful when they continue to vote the lion's share of U.S. foreign aid—close to half the total of U.S. bilateral aid worldwide—to Israel. In the 1992 fiscal year the U.S. gave nearly $1,000 for every Israeli man, woman, and child. Congress passed this legislation despite Israel's denial of basic human rights to more than a million Palestinians under its occupation and open Israeli disregard for international law.

What I learned from my research at the FEC is that whether or not pro-Israel PACs break the letter of the law, they certainly violate its spirit and intent. These donations of millions of dollars to candidates for Congress purchase appropriations of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to Israel. This money, in turn, subsidizes Israel's oppression of the Palestinians and the illegal appropriation of their lands for Jewish "settlements" in the occupied territories. Instead of holding Israel to the standards of a true democracy, such heedless U.S. government giving makes it possible for Israel to discriminate on religious grounds against people under its control.

Israeli human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel summed it all up best. In a recent interview for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's "Frontline" documentary, "Journey to the Occupied Lands," she said: "The Palestinians envied the Israeli democracy. They realized that there is democracy in Israel and it exists mainly for Jews. . . The feeling was that at least they will get some leftovers from that democracy table. And it took them, I think, like 20 years to realize that there is democracy over there, but there is no democracy for them."