AIPAC Considered One of Top US Lobbies

By Mark H. Milstein

If one were to believe some of this particular organization's more critical observers, there's only one personage who might get the ear of a senator or congress member more quickly—and his reappearance would be a major religious event.

The organization under discussion is not the insurance lobby or the American Association of Retired Persons, although both are quite influential in their own right. It is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most effective and powerful lobbying groups on Capitol Hill.

Rising out of the ashes of the American Zionist Committee, AIPAC was founded in 1954 by former AZC chairman I.L. (Si) Kenen.

AIPAC's goal for its first year of work on the Hill was $150 million in US aid for then fledgling Israel. The request was rejected out-of-hand by the State Department, on the grounds that such a move would offend the Arab states.

After much lobbying, however, Kenen and AIPAC got their wish, albeit greatly scaled down, and Israel received $15 million that year in US foreign aid.

Observers said that by securing congressional approval of the aid package, despite executive branch opposition, AIPAC defined and then redefined the way lobbying would be done in Washington for decades to come.

"Enhancing US-Israeli Relations"

"AIPAC's job is to shape opinion favorable to Israel," said Toby Dershowitz, an AIPAC spokesperson. "Its main goal is enhancing US-Israeli relations."

Currently AIPAC claims nearly 50,000 members and operates behind the scenes lobbying Congress and the administration for economic and military aid to Israel—which last year totaled well over $3 billion—as well as against US arms sales to Arab nations.

But it was not until the mid- 1970s that AIPAC honed to a razor-sharp edge its much talked and written about carrot-and-stick lobbying. That abrasive strategy carried AIPAC well into the early '80s, but proved on many occasions to be a lightning rod for what AIPAC's board saw as undue negative media attention.

Case in point: When former Senator Charles Percy (R-IL), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voted in 1981 in favor of President Reagan's ultimately successful plan to sell AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia, AIPAC's bare knuckles efforts to defeat him in the 1984 elections, although successful, drew a barrage of harsh words from many, including AIPAC supporters.

The fallout from the Percy affair had AIPAC doing double duty, denying to the general public any direct culpability in the senator's defeat. At the same time, it was reassuring its hard-line supporters that, from then on, they could warn elected officials from their states that AIPAC would deal with them as it dealt with Percy if they voted against Israel.

"All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy," said Tom Dine, executive director of AIPAC, at an AIPAC fundraising dinner in Toronto, Canada. "And the American politicians those who hold public positions now and those who aspire to" got the message.

AIPAC defined and then redefined the way lobbying would be done in Washington for decades to come.

The text of Tom Dine's remarks on AIPAC's campaign against Percy, which Dine said "defined Jewish power in America for the rest of this century, " leaked out of the closed session in Toronto and startled many, including the Arab-American community.

Long awed by the almost magical ability of American Jews to gain the sympathy of Congress and the administration, the Arab-American community set out to counterattack by combating stereotypical US media portrayals of Arabs as evil, turban-wearing desert nomads.

Two major groups were founded, the first being the National Association of Arab Americans, which was registered to lobby Congress. Shortly afterward, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) also was created, not to lobby so much as to counter stereotypes and investigate and correct stereotyping or discrimination against Arab Americans.

Founded by former Senator James G. Abourezk (D-SD) and James Zogby, who later left to form the Washington-based Arab American Institute, the 10-year-old ADC now claims 25,000 members and prides itself as the nation's largest Arab-American membership group.

"We have gone from being the devil incarnate to people who are like everybody else, " said Zogby, speaking of the work of all of the Arab-American groups. " Everyone is being forced to re-evaluate us and our history."

According to figures supplied by the National Association of Arab Americans, of two million Americans of Arab ancestry, fewer than 100,000 belong to an Arab-American organization, while of 5.9 million Jewish Americans, two million are active.

Many Arab Americans claim that therein lies the problem. Where Jewish groups, they said, lobby with cohesion, Arab-American groups continue to be splintered on many issues.

Arab-American Lobbying

"The impact of Arab-American lobbying is not clear, " William Quandt of the Brookings Institution told The Washington Post. "Over the years, the activity of Arab-American groups has legitimized the fact that they have a right to be heard like any other ethnic group. They are on the map as far as correcting the balance. What they are not good at is bringing about change in foreign policy. They don't have the political weight to do that."

Quandt noted that "the Israeli Embassy and AIPAC work hand-in-hand as far as lobbying and working on the Hill. On the Arab side, there is no single Arab government and none of the 20 embassies in Washington tries to coordinate and synchronize the domestic with the Arab events."

Behind the facade of a highly effective lobby that can terrorize members of Congress who don't toe its line on the Middle East, however, recent years have brought changes to AIPAC, notably a fracturing of its once unwavering support by American Jews.

In 1988, for example, the leaders of three national American Jewish organizations attacked the hard-line stance taken by AIPAC as being out of step "with the consensus of the organized Jewish community."

In a full-page ad in The New York Times, the leaders of the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith blasted AIPAC's hard-line stand against sales of missiles to Kuwait and its demands that the PLO mission to the UN be shut down and that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat be denied a visa to speak before the General Assembly.

In separate statements, however, leaders of those Jewish organizations considerably diluted the criticism. David Harris, Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, said, "It's important to stress that, notwithstanding those few policy differences in the joint letter to AIPAC, the indisputable fact is that, on most major issues affecting Israel, there has been a high degree of consensus among AIPAC and the three organizations."

Following on the heels of the letter came another bombshell.

Memos leaked to The Washington Post showed conclusively that AIPAC, which for years had insisted it did not endorse candidates, but instead limited its actions to providing its members with candidate voting records and position papers, had been actively involved with a virtual armada of deceptively named pro-Israel political action committees in directing funds to the campaigns of several candidates in the 1986 Senate race.

The memos show that one of the pro-Israel committees, ICEPAC, was guided by AIPAC into giving $2,500 to Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA), $3,500 to then-Representative Tom Daschle (D-SD), $1,000 to then-Representative Harry Reid (D-NV), and $500 to Senate candidate John Evans (D-ID).

Exponential Growth

Figures show that in the 1980s, the number of such pro-Israel PACs with names that conceal their identity and purpose grew exponentially. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal wrote that 80 pro-Israel PACs donated nearly $7 million to candidates, and in some instances cooperated to dole out as much as $200,000 to an individual candidate, where a single special-interest PAC is forbidden by law from donating more than $10,000 to an individual candidate in a single election cycle. The facts revealed that the pro-Israel lobby was the largest single-issue donor in the United States, and the only major player in the field of lobbying Congress on behalf of a foreign power.

AIPAC, for its part, replied: "This organization does not coordinate, direct, or control political action committees. Money in politics is natural, not bad; PAC money follows the philosophy of candidates; financial participation in politics is an aspect of activism and involvement."

Then in January of 1989 AIPAC was hit by a major complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by former US government officials, alleging that since members of AIPAC's board had founded PACs, and AIPAC officers were advising those PACs on how to distribute their donations, AIPAC was, in effect, a PAC itself and one that was exceeding the limits on donations.

"AIPAC's formidable ability to mobilize congressional support ... is based not upon an appeal to the American national interest but upon threats by a special interest that has resorted to conspiracy and collusion, " said a statement by Richard Curtiss, formerly the chief inspector of the US Information Agency and one of the plaintiffs, at a 1988 press conference.

Although officers of the individual PACs have been informed they no longer are under investigation, the FEC has not yet ruled on, the complaint against AIPAC itself. In any case, many agree that it's now only a matter of time before new FEC regulations come into effect that will hamper AIPAC's ability to engage in the very activities for which it raises money from what it euphemistically calls "the pro-Israel community."

Nevertheless, AIPAC still is riding high with members of that community. "Unity, putting on a common front, is extremely critical to Jews, " said one prominent Jewish leader. "AIPAC represents Israel, represents all that, better than anybody else right now, so nobody is going to attack AIPAC publicly."

Mark H. Milstein is a Washington-based journal who specializes in foreign affairs.