AIPAC has involved the U.S. in a revolting crime against humanity that will almost certainly undermine American security at home and abroad, writes Cara MariAnna. It must be broken.
Protester outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 20, 2016. (Susan Melkisethian, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Cara MariAnna
The Floutist
“. . . the United States will not be able to deal with the vexing problems in the Middle East if it cannot have a serious and candid discussion of the role of the Israel lobby.” —John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
As Israel began accelerating its bombing campaign in Gaza last month, the president of the United States sat with Israel’s prime minister at the start of an Israeli war cabinet meeting. Benjamin Netanyahu had phoned Joe Biden two days previously to request what The Times of Israel called a “solidarity visit.”
Much has passed since Biden’s visit to Israel. The atrocity of Israel’s indiscriminate military campaign in Gaza is now widely recognized as constituting a genocide. Principled non–Western nations — Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras — began last week to sever relations with Tel Aviv or recall their ambassadors. Since then, an additional five countries have pulled their ambassadors from Israel including South Africa, Jordan and Turkey. The world order, as should be obvious, has been disrupted.
But questions remain. What does solidarity, as Biden pledges, mean when Israel is daily committing war crimes for all the world to see? Why is the U.S., in violation of international law and everything it claims to stand for, aiding and abetting Israel’s agenda of ethnic cleansing in Gaza? Why, bringing matters closer to home, is the United States prioritizing the interests and security of Israel above its own, while simultaneously damaging its credibility and authority abroad?
These questions raise the subject of the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. U.S. foreign policy aligns so congruently with AIPAC’s agenda that there is little distinction between them. In effect, the U.S. lacks an independent foreign policy that reflects its own security interests in West Asia.
At this critical moment of violence, human suffering and chaos, we must recognize that AIPAC, an unelected, technically nongovernmental agency, exercises an excessive, wholly inappropriate influence in global affairs as well as in U.S. politics. This is very rarely mentioned in our corporate media, and we can read this silence as a measure of the organization’s unacceptable accumulation of power.
End Aid to Israel demonstration in Washington on Nov. 4 during the Israeli assault on Gaza. (Consortium News)
AIPAC’s influence on U.S. policy, domestic as well as foreign, has been considered many times. Most notably, there is the work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, whose 2008 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, stands as the most extensive examination of AIPAC’s power we have to date.
Their analysis is now more pertinent than ever. In the current context, given the magnitude of what is unfolding — given its potential impact on relationships among many different nations — we must recognize that AIPAC’s reach extends well beyond Washington or West Asia. Indeed, the committee’s influence is now evident in world affairs altogether. This is our disturbing reality.
Lobbying is paramount among AIPAC’s various activities. As a lobbying group, it devotes its efforts to ensuring that U.S. policy in West Asia
- a) prioritizes the containment of nations considered hostile to Israel, specifically, Iran, Iraq, and Syria,
- b) prevents these countries from acquiring effective deterrents to Israel’s nuclear arsenal, and
- c) precludes any viable solution to the Palestinian question — a crisis caused when the state of Israel was founded and the homes and lands of indigenous Arabs were forcibly taken.
Invading Iraq & Sinking Iran Nuclear Deal
Ranking among AIPAC’s most significant efforts, it was intimately involved in getting Congress to support George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. As reported recently by Eli Clifton in Responsible Statecraft, AIPAC cynically repeated the “Bush administration’s erroneous claim that Saddam Hussein was in league with al–Qaeda.”
In The Israel Lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt quote AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr’s statement to the New York Sun in January 2003, two months before the invasion, in which he acknowledged that “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” Disturbingly, as Clifton reports, AIPAC has since worked to expunge evidence of its support for the unpopular war from the record.
The multi-party agreement governing Iran’s nuclear programs was another among AIPAC’s major targets. In 2015 it spent millions in an unsuccessful attempt to kill President Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic accord, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This was a major hopeful step toward normalizing relations with Iran and ending decades of crippling sanctions. Undeterred, the lobby continued working to undermine the accord after it was signed in July 2015.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, seated due to an injured leg, bids goodbye to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Vienna, July 14, 2015, after Zarif read a declaration of the nuclear agreement in his native Farsi. (State Department)
Finding an ally in former President Donald Trump — whose campaign was heavily financed by members of the pro–Israel lobby opposed to the JCPOA, notably Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson — AIPAC redoubled its efforts, sending thousands of lobbyists to Congress in the months leading up to the U.S. withdrawal from the agreement on May 8, 2018. It was among the first major policy reversals, and one of the most consequential, of Trump’s presidency.
The Israel lobby, led by AIPAC, exerts inordinate influence on all government discourse and policy matters related to Palestinian sovereignty and rights. Voices in support of Palestinians are almost never heard within the government — a prohibition AIPAC has cultivated over many decades. Any critique of Israel or AIPAC, in turn, is labeled anti–Semitic and swiftly punished.
Congresswoman Ilan Omar, for example, was removed from her position on the Foreign Affairs Committee in early 2023 for comments she made on Twitter questioning “the financial relationship between AIPAC . . . and members of Congress.”
Trump speaking at AIPAC, Washington, D.C., March 21, 2015. (Lorie Shaull, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
A recent Washington Post article, “In Israeli–Palestinian battle to sway Congress, only one side wins,” describes the unparalleled and unrivaled power AIPAC has over public discourse and ultimately American policy:
“Pro–Israel lobbyist groups and individuals contributed nearly $31 million to American congressional candidates during last year’s election cycle — more than six times the contributions candidates received from the gun rights lobby — according to Open Secrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data.”
Biden’s Visit to Israel
With this reality in mind — a dangerous reality given AIPAC’s extremist character — let’s consider Biden’s visit to Israel last month.
Biden has given two speeches since that war cabinet meeting, one in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, the other upon returning to Washington, when he addressed the nation on Oct. 20. In each, the president reiterated all of the talking points and established dogma that have long characterized the U.S. relationship with Israel, all of which support Israeli priorities.
Nothing new was offered — no moral clarity, no fresh vision of how to address the original moral crime committed against the Palestinians when their homeland was taken from them 75 years ago, a theft of land that accounts for the never-ending cycle of violence we witness once again.
Biden performed on command in Israel: He was called to Tel Aviv, and answered the call, solely to legitimize what is profoundly illegitimate and to provide political cover for Israel as it finds itself increasingly alone in a world in which few nations beyond the West sanction the crimes it now commits.
Biden with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18. (The White House, Public domain)
He assured Israel of U.S. unconditional support and subsequently promised $14.3 billion in new military assistance — this atop of a 10-year package of $38 billion committed during the Obama years. In short, Biden has licensed Israel to do whatever it wants — and Israel is doing just that — including razing Gaza City to the ground and ridding the north of the territory of all Palestinians.
Two factors explain this abject policy failure: First and obviously, this president isn’t capable of statesmanship of the magnitude required. Moreover, he professes a deep personal affinity for the Zionist vision — for Israel to seize all the lands of Biblical Palestine as its own — and no incentive to do anything other than align himself with Israel’s interest.
More important and directly to my point, with Biden serving as an almost perfect example: No new thinking and no new policies are ever possible because of AIPAC’s stranglehold on U.S. elections, politics and politicians.
The world is a far more dangerous place, far more Palestinians have been killed, and the U.S. is far less secure, since Biden’s visit to Israel. AIPAC is more or less directly responsible for this.
It should not be difficult to miss the gravity, the peril indeed, of the post–Oct. 7 crisis in West Asia. The region threatens to explode, and there is no able leadership in the United States, in large part because its foreign policy has been shaped by a special-interest group that has worked for decades in behalf of another nation.
Washington’s unthinking, pro–Israel bias has blinded U.S. policy elites such that no one in Washington, and certainly not Biden nor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appears to understand that there is a seismic shift in global power taking place.