AIPAC's Faustian Dilemma

All in the service of a failed dream are myths planted and nurtured to fruition. Lies in reality, myth is the polite euphemism favored by journalism in America to describe the verbal—and worse—assassination job done on the Palestinians by the Israel Lobby. All done to realize an imagined paradisiacal Israel, flowing with milk and honey, free of enemies and full of righteousness.

Myth Number One said the Palestinians didn't exist. Palestine was an empty land. Thus no harm could come to existing inhabitants if Jews came in to settle. "The people without a land (the Jews) for the land without a people" went the old slogan. So compelling is the Israel Lobby's compulsion not to acknowledge the guilt-laden plain truth—that Palestine was already fully settled by Palestinians—that variations on the "Palestine was empty" theme continue to appear.

Variations concede that while Palestinians did exist, they were few in number. In the face of dozens of Israeli accounts that the Palestinians were terrorized into fleeing their homes, the Lobby continues to assert fanatically that they left only because of the most vile anti-Jewish motives. These were that their leaders said: Get out of the way while we push the Jews into the sea, and then come back.

The Jews didn't force the Palestinians out, it is claimed. Rather they left of their own accord while Jews forced out of Arab countries came in to replace them, a simple exchange of populations, sanctioned by many such exchanges in history.

A recent improbable new variation, actually a superficially clever hoax, says the Palestinian refugees were only recent arrivals in Palestine from Syria and Egypt—against mountains of evidence to the contrary—come in to batten on the prosperity brought in by Jewish settlers. The real facts are ignored that the settlers didn't employ Arab labor, and besides were always broke until the Israel Lobby stole the key to the U.S. Treasury. Not the truth but guilt-easing hoax was seized on by the "Israel Firsters" in the U.S. who still love the unsullied image of a golden Israel.

The second basic myth—and this also has variations—is that the Palestinians are not quite human. They are terrorists, violent by nature, like Shakespeare's lago driven by "motiveless malignity." In an America deemed to be wonderfully creative, the Lobby has created and sustained an expression it ought to be ashamed of, assuming there is any sense of history and decency left. That is the racist "Palestinian terrorist," the latter day equivalent of the old "dirty Jew."

The Israel Lobby could study with profit the legend of Faust, essentially a true reflection of human yearning after the unachievable. Faust sought power, bargained with the Devil to get it and gave away his soul to seal the bargain. He discovered that all he'd really received was a handful of magical tricks.

Some among the Lobby have, like Faust, gone all the way. In pursuit of the failed dream they have become "Israel Firsters," Americans who enjoy U.S. life and American citizenship but who give their real loyalty to the State of Israel. Having spiritually forsaken America, they have gained an Israel in which they would be miserable and which doesn't want them anyway. These can only fall back on murky rhetoric about the "centrality" of Israel in Jewish life.

The part of the Lobby still this side of the abyss must at least dimly perceive by now its role in promoting extremism in Israel. Ultras like Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and the rapidly rising Rabbi Meir Kahane could not have brutalized Israel's neighbors and so paralyzed Israeli society without unquestioning Lobby support for any regime in Israel, no matter how crazy that regime's shenanigans.

The Lobby relentlessly exploits other Americans by buying up politicians with millions in camouflaged Political Action Committee money. This gets Israel $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer gifts per year. Still Israel is bankrupt, living on charity. The Lobby also shamelessly exploits U.S. Jews by employing the wildest hyberbole about such high-minded politicians as former Senator Charles Percy and former Congressman Paul Findley, both depicted as dangerous enemies of Israel. The AWACS, flying radar system sold to Saudi Arabia was described to potential Jewish campaign contributors as "the deadly AWACS fighter." Non-Jewish Americans are painted as dangerous potential or actual enemies of Israel, and of Jews generally, in modern variations of the old "Cossacks are coming" scare tactic.

If U.S. Middle East policy continues on its present suicidal course, the American people will one day turn against the Lobby. It will happen as Americans continue to die in large numbers fighting Israel's wars against the Arabs. In the long run Israel cannot prevail in unending war against the Arabs, no matter what the level of U.S. support. According to a recent estimate the Arabs could number one billion within 40 years.

Jews who want to flee an angry America will find themselves unwelcome in an extremist and increasingly rigidly Orthodox Israel. European Jews, who constitute the bulk of American Jewry, may not be welcome in an Israel overwhelmingly Oriental. More than that, they will hardly even be regarded as Jews. In an America where 40 percent of Jews are now marrying Christians, who's a Jew and who isn't becomes a tricky business.

What makes it hardest to sustain charitable thoughts about the Lobby at this stage is its continued harping on the Us and Them theme. This is done in an accusing sense. We, 17 million Americans, went into uniform to help defeat the Axis, especially the Nazi scourge. But we are told that the United States should have gone in earlier and done more. The implication is that anti-Jewish feeling was the explanation for U.S. tardiness in coming to the assistance of Britain. Waters are muddied by charges that the United States should have bombed the rail line to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. These accusing complaints overlook the fact that American Zionists, like Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, as late as 1943 were of two minds on the wisdom of a special American campaign to rescue European Jewry. They also ignore the comment by General "Hap" Arnold, head of the World War II U.S. Army Air Corps, who stated while he was still alive that no proposal to bomb the Auschwitz line ever came to his attention.

The Lobby has been very lucky in harnessing U.S. power to Israeli policy. If it pushes luck too far, however, it may create a State of Israel where no U.S. Jew could bear to go.

—Andrew I. Killgore

May 19, 1986, Page 3

A Particular Point of View

A funny thing happened to us on the way to the printer with this issue. We had asked Richard B. Straus, editor of Middle East Policy Survey, for permission to reprint an article of his which the Washington Post had published under the headline "Israel's New Super-Lobby in Washington: Reagan and Co." Author Straus granted permission, but Editor Elsie Carper of the Washington Post did not. It was the second time in the Washington Report's four-year existence that an editor has declined to give or sell us reprint rights. We looked back into our files and found the other denial was for an article entitled "Pro-Israel PACs Giving More to GOP." It also was from the Washington Post. The letter denying permission was signed by Elsie Carper, who informed us that "it is Post policy not to permit the reprinting of news articles in publication (sic) that would tend to give an impression that the Washington Post was endorsing a particular point of view."

One point Straus, a former AIPAC staffer whose work we have published previously, seems to be trying to make in the thoughtful analysis which we are not permitted to reprint, is that since American lobbyists for Israel are now getting everything they ask for, and far more than they formerly could expect, perhaps it's too rich a diet for Israel's long-term good health. It very likely will isolate Israel, and the U.S., in an increasingly hostile Middle East.

Whether or not that's a fair statement of Richard B. Straus' point of view, it certainly is an accurate statement of ours. We're sorry Ms. Carper is afraid of giving an impression that the Washington Post endorses it.

American friends of Israel seem undecided about the new Israeli-U.S. relationship. Executive Director Tom Dine of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee calls it "a deep, broad-based partnership progressing day by day toward a full-fledged diplomatic and military alliance." Shultz, he says, is "the architect of the special relationship."

Noting that in addition to Israel's regular $2.2 billion handout from the U.S. Government, Shultz got an additional $1.5 billion in "emergency" U.S. aid for Israeli last year, Dine says "George Shultz has made himself the U.S. project manager for Israel's economy."

Richard B. Straus, editor of Middle East Policy Survey and a former AIPAC staffer himself, has analyzed the new ascendency of his former AIPAC colleagues in the April 28 Washington Post:

"Israel and AIPAC ... pushed hard through the 1970s for more American aid, weapons and diplomatic support for Israel ... Then one day, sometime in the mid-1980s, Israel and AIPAC realized that there had been a change. They were pushing against a door that was already open ... The implications of this revolution in U.S.-Israeli relations are, at this point, difficult to assess. Will it enhance Israeli security over the long run? Will it encourage Arab moderation and recognition of Israel? Or will it instead inflame radical sentiment in the Middle East?"

The fact that Straus raises these questions indicates that he, like anyone who really knows the Middle East, already is pretty certain of the answers.

But Shultz apparently isn't. In fact, Straus points out, Shultz defies the conventional wisdom: "Shultz became the first senior administration official while in office to shift away from the Arabs and towards Israel and not the other way around."

And so, in Washington today, paid espionage against the United States by Israel, as the Jonathan Jay Pollard case reveals, is treated as a minor inconvenience. The same ho hum applies to the planned secret sale by Israelis of $2.5 billion dollars worth of weapons to Iran, the real fount of terrorism against the United States during recent years.

Even in the San Francisco trial of Jerry Whitworth, accused of turning over daily Navy code books to John Walker for transmission to the Soviet Union, the defense tried desperately to build its case around the possibility that Whitworth thought he was spying for Israel rather than the Soviet Union. His attorneys had apparently concluded that those caught betraying the U.S. on behalf of Israel are punished lightly, if at all.

All of this is creating a tragedy of epic proportions. It is radicalizing the Middle East, where before Reagan came to power we still had a lot of sincere friends. It may turn the Muslim fifth of the world's population against America. It almost certainly will continue to loosen, perhaps irretrievably, ties between the U.S. and some or all of our NATO partners. It may convince new leaders of the Soviet Union that the superpower with which they were preparing to negotiate serious arms reductions is run by an amiable eccentric, who generally follows the instincts of his youth and the advice of whomever he spoke to last.

Since that seems to be the way Americans also perceive their President, it means that when things go sour overseas they will likely blame the Secretary of State, not his boss. If it's an open secret that Israel's American friends tell Mr. Shultz what to do and when, they may also be held accountable when things go wrong. And from the kinds of questions Mr. Strauss is asking, it's clear that some of them know that putting heavy pressure on the Arabs, and none at all on Israel, will indeed go badly wrong.

It would be nice to believe that, after six years of spending on arms, President Reagan is on the verge of telling the Soviets that he feels the U.S. is secure and he is ready to negotiate a fail-safe, mutual arms reduction with them. And it would be wonderful to believe that now, after he has given Israel everything it says it needs, Secretary Shultz is on the verge of telling the Israelis that unless they negotiate real peace with the Palestinians, the music stops and the party's over.

But before you get carried away with such dreams, watch a press conference by Mr. Reagan, who six years ago didn't know the answers about foreign policy, and now doesn't even seem to understand the questions. And watch George Shultz, who started out looking for peace but took all his directions from Israel. By the time he catches up with the mob he thinks he's pleasing, he may find its succinct, familiar message is addressed to him:

"You've had it, Pal."