Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Page 42

Too Big to Fight

Tiny Israel’s Giant U.S. Lobby Goes Unmentioned in Campaign Finance Hearings

By Mitchell Kaidy

In all the clamor from the Senate and House hearings about baleful foreign influences on American political campaigns, one nation's influence is certain to be absent-without-leave. That nation is Israel.

American partisans of China or Taiwan have been projected in news stories in cautionary terms as corrupted agents. Yet how successful were those Americans on behalf of their sponsors in bending and capitalizing on American foreign policy?

It has yet to be shown that their influence and contributions distorted American policy in any significant respect. Perhaps their political contributions amounted to hundreds of thousands or even millions of hopeful dollars, and their activities extended to one or two presidential cycles.

Contrast that with the tiny nation of five million that has demonstrably succeeded in turning the United States into a bottomless well of gold from which, for decades, it has drawn all the guns that it can possibly use.

That its name won't be whispered at the hearings results not only because the chairmen of the congressional investigating committees have received pro-Israel political contributions. It's not as simple as that. Israel won't be mentioned because, based on per capita aid from unknowing taxpayers, it has become a veritable state of the United States. Indeed, with media cooperation and assistance, Israel has ascended to the ranks of an affluent, belligerent yet untouchable super-state. Self-imposed blinders on the Senate and House likewise guarantee that Israel's vast American lobby, headed by the all-powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), also won't be mentioned at any hearing. This despite the fact that AIPAC continues to inject millions of dollars into both presidential and congressional races with hard and soft money whose sources repeatedly have been questioned but never have been properly disclosed.

Even while denying that it is a lobby, AIPAC proved otherwise last year by boasting that it alone had met with every new member of Congress. Among its beneficiaries are both Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the Senate investigating committee chairman, as well as bipartisan members of both committees, all of whom, as they wax indignant, have been seeded by donations from political action committees (PACs) connected with AIPAC.

Last year AIPAC's outgoing chairman was able to become national chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

AIPAC has become so deeply embedded in the American political fabric that last year its outgoing chairman, Steve Grossman, was able to become national chairman of the Democratic Committee without exciting any adverse media comment over this elevation of the chief lobbyist for a special interest, and a foreign government at that, into the top policymaker position of the president's political party. This September, AIPAC deputy political affairs director Fran Katz became finance director of the DNC, contributing to the impression that the foreign lobby and the incumbent party have become one and the same.

AIPAC's budget is estimated at $13 to $15 million annually. Although it insists it is "not a lobby," it has publicly boasted about its role in the defeats of two former chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Republican Charles Percy of Illinois, plus several congressmen who weren't perceived as sufficiently pro-Israel.

And yet AIPAC has refused to comply with financial disclosure laws which other political committees are forced to observe. Under a class-action suit now before the U.S. Supreme Court, that could change. Lending significant support to that prospect was a decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC which voted 8-2 to overturn a Federal Election Commission ruling exempting AIPAC from responsibility to report.

The legal action, brought by one-time high U.S. government officials including two former ambassadors, the former chief inspector of the U.S. Information Agency, a former undersecretary of state and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (now deceased) and the former commander of the U.S. Navy's Middle East Force, seeks to shed the light of day on AIPAC and its multifarious activities.

Despite its protestations, AIPAC acts like a lobby, speaks like a lobby, directs spending on candidates like a lobby and advises members of Congress on pending legislation and spending. Yet because it claims that it also does other things, it claims exemption from public disclosure laws that all other lobbies must rigorously observe.

A False Front

Behind its false front, according to the former government officials' suit, AIPAC has coordinated the activities of a network of PACs which operate under deceptive names and, together, constitute one of the top-spending special interests in the nation.

Having embarrassed the Democratic president and vice-president and demonstrated that political sleaziness still rules at the very top, what else can the concurrent Senate and House hearings achieve if they continue to avoid examining the major foreign influence on the U.S. Congress? Certainly not real campaign finance reform, which would upset AIPAC and might reduce the legislators' campaign contributions.

Real campaign reform might also restore the power balance between a professed superpower in North America and its de facto master—a tiny, violent, colonialist regime in the Middle East which, so far in the congressional hearings, has never once been mentioned by name.