Copyright 1991 The Washington Post
June 13, 1991, Thursday, Final Edition
BYLINE: Lloyd Grove, Washington Post Staff Writer
Subject: Israel.
Target: Nancy Kassebaum.
Methods: Sweet reason, shock therapy.
A dozen pro-Israel activists filed into Kassebaum's Senate office. Two staffers carried in extra chairs, and the Kansas Republican helped set them up.
"The question," Shaol Pozez told Kassebaum, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "is how do we go about getting this peace process going?" A retired discount shoe store tycoon, sporting athletic footwear this morning, Pozez used to share a back-yard fence with her father, Alf Landon -- which is why he was there. She nodded, politely. The pleasantries were over.
"Israel," Pozez told her, "will do everything short of national suicide to make peace."
"Isn't the PLO going to have to be there at some point, Shaol?" she demanded of Pozez, a frequent political contributor -- though not, in recent years, to Kassebaum. The room fell deathly still at the mention of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as though someone had just suggested ... national suicide. "It seems to me that this is an opportunity," Kassebaum went on, her jaw set, "and everybody's got to be willing to give."
Frowns spread around the room.
So much for sweet reason.
Kassebaum's visitors that morning, most of them with Kansas connections, were from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- AIPAC, for short -- the foreign policy equivalent of the National Rifle Association. Their mission, a life-defining one, is "strengthening the American-Israel relationship," mainly by securing American aid for the Jewish state and blocking U.S. weapons sales to hostile Arabs.
AIPAC is one of the most resented and respected, admired and feared, lobbying organizations in the United States. Kassebaum is one of very few in Congress who will speak bluntly about the group on the record.
"Sometimes," she said, "they're just absolutely, totally inflexible."
If so, perhaps it's because so many Jews, no matter how comfortable in American society, feel themselves linked to a long history of worldwide persecution, culminating in the Holocaust in which 6 million perished. Israel, in the minds of some, may be the only safe haven -- and thus deserves special treatment.
Those in Congress and elsewhere who disagree, or complain about AIPAC's heavy-handedness, tend to do so sotto voce -- terrified of being branded with the epithet "antisemite" or, even worse, "self-hating Jew." In March, half the Senate and a third of the House accepted invitations to schmooze with 2,100 true believers at AIPAC's 32nd annual policy conference, an impressive show of pro-Israel power. In the oft-repeated catch-phrase of AIPAC's detractors, the lobby has made Israel "America's 51st state."
As the pro-Israel lobby anointed to speak for the major U.S. Jewish organizations -- not, as some persist in believing, Israel's registered agent -- AIPAC has prospered mightily since its birth 37 years ago. In the past decade, the lobby has quadrupled its staff to more than 100 and quintupled its membership to 55,000 households -- attracting a new breed of non-Jewish activists like Allen Mothersill -- while its member-financed budget has grown even more, from $ 1.4 million in 1980 to $ 12 million in 1991.
It owes much of its growth to Tom Dine, the lobby's executive director for the past decade, a charismatic proponent of pressure-group politics.
Yet AIPAC's rapid expansion has forced it to cope with a host of competing constituencies -- from liberal Democratic Jews to conservative Republican members of Congress, from American doves to Israeli hard-liners. The lobby also faces mounting and contradictory criticism, from a wide array of political activists both here and in Israel. It is accused, alternately, of climbing into bed with the executive branch at the expense of its friends in Congress; allying itself with the Republican Party at the expense of its ties to the Democrats; and becoming a creature of the Likud Party at the expense of Labor -- "representing," according to Yossi Beilin, a Labor member of the Israeli parliament, "the 'Israel That Refuses.' "
AIPAC officials heatedly dispute the charges, and privately complain that such dissension in the ranks serves only the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.
Tom Dine is fond of quoting Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger: "Dine, I deal with you because you could hurt me."
A Rough Reputation
AIPAC's influence with Congress is due partly to a widespread predisposition to back Israel anyway -- though recent polls have shown that U.S. public opinion, while generally supportive of Israel, can vary sharply in reaction to events in the Middle East. Just as important to the lobby's clout is its reputation for playing rough.
"We are slaves to some of the lobbying groups," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) complained on the day of the Desert Storm vote. "I do not have to name names," Byrd went on, "but I could."
"My colleagues think AIPAC is a very, very powerful organization that is ruthless, and very, very alert," said another senator who, like so many on the subject of AIPAC, asked that his name not be named. "Eighty percent of the senators here roll their eyes on some of the votes. They know that what they're doing isn't what they really believe is right, but why fight on a situation where they're liable to get beat up on?
"There's no countervailing sentiment," this senator added, noting that the small but ardent circle of pro-Israel activists, unlike its Arab-American counterpart, gives millions of dollars every election cycle to candidates for office. "If you vote contrary to the tremendous pressure of AIPAC, no one says to you, 'That's great.' "
The 1984 defeat of Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.) -- the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who crossed the lobby once too often -- is one of several in recent years ascribed to pro-Israel money. "All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy," Dine claimed in a speech after the 1984 election. "And American politicians ... got the message."
Yet many U.S. Jews are uncomfortable with such talk, and see the specter of antisemitism behind every public reference to the "Jewish lobby," as AIPAC is frequently called by its opponents. Rep. Tim Valentine (D-N.C.), whose House amendment to cut the $ 650 million in extra aid for Israel received a mere 24 votes, blamed the Jewish community for its lopsided defeat.
"I do plan to find an opportunity to talk to my Jewish friends," the congressman vowed, "and say, 'Do you realize the impression that this thing makes, when you come down with full force, all the strength that you have, for a few bucks? My God, what does that say?' " Asked what it said, Valentine responded, "I don't know. You know what I mean."
Understandably, perhaps, AIPAC prefers to operate outside the spotlight. "A lobby is like a night flower," AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues, Steven Rosen, once wrote in an internal memo. "It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."
Thus the lobby has a touchy relationship with the Fourth Estate, a medium that other public affairs groups routinely exploit. Often, it finds itself criticizing reporters. In May, it launched a grass-roots letter-writing campaign to CNN, protesting a special report that was critical of Israel. Reporter Mark Feldstein said hundreds of letters poured in. Along with some well-argued ones, taking their cue from AIPAC's "Monthly Update" to members, "some of it was pretty nasty," Feldstein said. "You know, 'self-hating Jew' was used, 'the Nazis would be proud of you,' 'the Jews have always been their own worst enemies.' "
AIPAC's president, Mayer Mitchell, an Alabama businessman, has a policy of simply not speaking to the press. The four AIPAC employees permitted contact with journalists seldom speak for attribution, and Dine would only agree to go on the record for this series if his quotes were read back to him for approval. At AIPAC's recent policy conference, one of about 800 college students in attendance was asked to explain her commitment. "You really have to talk to the people in the press department," she replied, turning away.
In 1987, AIPAC's then-communications director, Barbara Amouyal, argued that this press-shy attitude was counterproductive to the lobby's aims. During her tenure, however, she often found herself trying to keep stories out of the news. Once, she pleaded with two Jewish newspapers not to print an item about a birthday party for Steven Rosen, during which a stripper performed on AIPAC premises. As an inducement to one of the papers, she offered, ironically, access to Tom Dine. She left AIPAC in frustration after 11 months.
Afterward, two AIPAC internal memos were aired by the CBS program "60 Minutes" and other news organizations in October 1988, resulting in the worst publicity AIPAC has ever endured, plus a formal complaint to the Federal Election Commission. Amouyal supplied one AIPAC memo urging news stories supporting a pro-Israel Senate candidate and attacking Jesse Jackson's "extramarital affairs." A second memo, which several reporters received over the transom, urged various political action committees to send money to pro-Israel candidates -- suggesting that AIPAC employees had involved themselves in political campaigns, contravening a long-standing AIPAC policy. AIPAC officials still sputter in anger when they discuss Amouyal and her alleged misdeed.
In January 1989, a coalition of Arab Americans, former diplomats and an ex-congressman accused the lobby of violating federal campaign spending limits by orchestrating the donations of 27 pro-Israel PACs. (AIPAC, which is not a political action committee, took its name long before PACs were invented.) The FEC ruled last December that there was "insufficient evidence" to support the charge -- though not everyone was persuaded.
"I think it's disingenuous for AIPAC to say, as for some peculiar reason they frequently do, that they don't direct any money," said Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.), an occasional critic of Israel who was targeted in 1988, when his opponent, Richard Licht, received an estimated $ 213,850 in pro-Israel PAC money.
The night before the FEC's announcement, the lobby's director of media liaison, Toby Dershowitz, visited the editor of Washington Jewish Week at his apartment. Over tea, she asked Andrew Silow Carroll not to assign his regular reporter, Larry Cohler, to the story. She argued that Cohler's previous AIPAC stories were inaccurate, and since several had been cited in the FEC complaint, he was a "player" in the case. Carroll recalled that he told her he'd think about it.
The next day, the ruling was announced and Carroll put Cohler on the story. A few days later, as Cohler was writing, Dershowitz phoned Carroll at his office. Also on the line was David Ifshin, AIPAC's legal counsel. "Mr. Ifshin has some things to say, and I think they're worth a listen," Dershowitz said, according to Carroll's notes of the conversation.
Ifshin, according to Carroll's notes, said Cohler's reporting on AIPAC had raised serious questions about his accuracy. If he were to cover that week's ruling, Ifshin warned the editor, AIPAC would reexamine his previous stories "with an eye toward litigation."
"That sounds to me like a threat of legal action," Carroll replied.
"Nobody is threatening you," Dershowitz interjected, before the conversation abruptly ended.
Carroll phoned Dershowitz back to tell her that Cohler was his reporter; he had no reason to doubt his journalistic abilities.
"Fine," she replied, according to Carroll's notes. "Then what about writing a positive editorial about our exoneration?"
"We've never pushed anybody around," Tom Dine said recently. "That's part of the lore."
