Michael Massing writes:
When Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo accords in 1993, AIPAC officially endorsed them, but—in contrast to its outspoken support of Likud policies—it remained largely silent. Seeing the Palestinians as terrorists who could not be trusted, the lobby looked for a way to subtly undermine the accords. It found one in the issue of where the US embassy in Israel should be located. Unlike all but two countries in the world (Costa Rica and El Salvador), the United States had its embassy not in Jerusalem but in Tel Aviv, in recognition of Jerusalem’s contested status. Under the Oslo accords, the city’s final disposition was to be taken up in talks set to begin in May 1996 and to conclude three years later.
Seeing the Palestinians as terrorists who could not be trusted? Massing begins this piece by describing AIPAC’s executive committee as a “couple of hundred” powerless representatives of American Jewish opinion who get together four times a year to discuss policy. But the “power rests with the fifty-odd-member board of directors, which is selected not according to how well they represent AIPAC’s members but according to how much money they give and raise.”
Reflecting this, the board is thick with corporate lawyers, Wall Street investors, business executives, and heirs to family fortunes. Within the board itself, power is concentrated in an extremely rich subgroup, known as the “minyan club.” And, within that group, four members are dominant: Robert Asher, a retired lighting fixtures dealer in Chicago; Edward Levy, a building supplies executive in Detroit; Mayer “Bubba” Mitchell, a construction materials dealer in Mobile, Alabama; and Larry Weinberg, a real estate developer in Los Angeles (and a former owner of the Portland Trail Blazers). Asher, Levy, and Mitchell are loyal Republicans; Weinberg is a Scoop Jackson Democrat who has moved rightward over the years.
The “Gang of Four,” as these men are known, do not share the general interest of a large part of the Jewish community in promoting peace in the Middle East. Rather, they seek to keep Israel strong, the Palestinians weak, and the United States from exerting pressure on Israel. AIPAC’s director, Howard Kohr, is a conservative Republican long used to doing the Gang of Four’s bidding. For many years Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s director of foreign policy issues, was the main power on the staff, helping to shape the Gang of Four’s pro-Likud beliefs into practical measures that AIPAC could promote in Congress. (In 2005, Rosen and fellow AIPAC analyst Keith Weissman left the organization and were soon after indicted by federal authorities for receiving classified national security information and passing it on to foreign (Israeli) officials.)
Compromise has never been in this gang’s dictionary. Recently, Philip Weiss did a brief review of the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney’s power grid, the think tank that Bush said “gave me more brains than anyone.” One of its funders is American Jewish millionaire and terrorist-supporter, Dr. Irving Moskowitz, whose patronage of illegal settlers in the West Bank is bested only by the Israeli government. Weiss knows he funds AEI not because the non-profit tanks that think for the government are required to disclose their financing to the American public, but because Cheney’s Middle East advisor and former director of Middle East studies for AEI, David Wurmser, thanks Moskowitz for doing so in his book, Tyranny’s Ally. According to Weiss, Wurmser advocates in that book “the “Move-over-one” strategy for peace in the Mideast. Give the Hashemites of Jordan Iraq, let the Palestinians have Jordan. Israel gets the West Bank.” Weiss also reminds that Wurmser was “one of the guys got us into the Iraq war by dispensing with the advice of the CIA or the State Department.” Michael Maloof was his creative partner.
Leak Inquiry Includes Iran Experts in Administration [ 4 September 2004 Washington Post ] is a reminder that Wurmser the “Iran specialist” “may have been involved in passing classified information to an Iraqi politician or a U.S. lobbying group allied with Israel.” So far, only Larry Franklin has been convicted for passing U.S. intelligence on Iran to Israel. More recent reports tagged Wurmser as the guy who told Scooter Libby that Valerie Plame sent Joe Wilson to Niger. Wurmser’s wife, Meyrav Wurmser, co-founded MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) and is currently working for the Hudson Institute as Director of Middle East Studies. Scooter Libby has taken refuge there.
In addition!
In addition, Ms Wurmser is a highly qualified, internationally recognised, inspiring and knowledgeable speaker on the Middle East whose presence would make any “event, radio or television show a unique one” – according to Benador Associates, a public relations company which touts her services.
As Jim Henley noted recently, Benador Associates is the public relations outfit that represents Iranian expatriate Amir Taheri, the liar who claimed Iran was going to force non-Muslims to wear different coloured clothing.
Massing air brushes monumental events in the history of Palestine-Israel negotiations and doesn’t mention that some of these politicians continue to lap-up the gravy after the elections though I suppose that’s obvious.
But pro-Israel activists in Congress were unwilling to wait. They got an unexpected boost in early 1995, when Republicans took control of the House. The new speaker, Newt Gingrich – casting about for ways to steer Jewish money and votes away from the Democrats – announced on a visit to Israel in January that he was going to support the transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem. In the Senate, Bob Dole, who had never shown much regard for Israel but who was preparing to challenge Bill Clinton for the presidency, said at that year’s AIPAC policy conference that he would support legislation mandating the transfer. He got a standing ovation.
According to The Public i:
Contract with an American is written by Charles Lewis and Margaret Ebrahim in The Public i. It investigates how Marianne Gingrich, the wife of Newt Gingrich, became vice president of the Israel Export Development Company. She had no previous international business experience, and her previous job had been selling cosmetics from her home. The job was arranged by former Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn), a registered lobbyist for the company.
Contract with an American (.pdf)
And Massing’s references to Dennis Ross imply he is a competent and honest broker.
Both Rabin and Bill Clinton were opposed to moving the embassy. They knew that such a step, by inflaming the Arab world, could disrupt the peace process. But for AIPAC and its allies, that was precisely the point. In October 1995 the Jerusalem Embassy Act overwhelmingly passed both houses of Congress. The act mandated the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem by 1999, unless the president invoked a national security waiver. Unwilling to challenge AIPAC, President Clinton let the bill become law without signing it. As anticipated, vehement protests came from every Arab capital. Clinton duly invoked the waiver, so no transfer occurred, but every six months his administration had to submit to Congress a report explaining how it was complying with the law. And members of Congress, eager to demonstrate their support for Israel, continued to produce a stream of resolutions and letters demanding the embassy’s transfer. The strain on the Oslo accords was intense.
It became even more so when Hillary Clinton decided to run for the Senate in New York. Wanting to court the all-important Jewish vote, she early on declared Jerusalem “the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel,” and throughout the remainder of the race she and her Republican opponent Rick Lazio argued in synagogues and speeches over who would be the quickest to move the embassy to Jerusalem.
By then, Bill Clinton was overseeing the Camp David peace talks. Every time the issue of the embassy transfer was mentioned in the news, the Palestinians objected, and America’s ability to serve as an honest broker was undermined. “I wasn’t thrilled with their emphasis on moving the embassy,” recalls Dennis Ross, Clinton’s chief negotiator. As he observes, the Israel lobby ultimately did not succeed – the embassy was never moved – but the semiannual need to invoke the waiver and report to Congress “put a burden on us. It took up a lot of our time.”
According to Clayton E. Swisher, in his excellent book, The Truth About Camp David:
pp. 227, 228
That summer the deep disdain for Ross on the part of the Palestinians was no longer a matter of speculation within the Clinton administration. The president, through Secretary Albright, had to put forward a response to an explosive Congressional bill, known as the “Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995,” which sought to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, hence giving the latter official U.S. recognition as the Israeli capital. To be sure, such an act would have seriously undermined negotiations at this most critical juncture, not the least because it would accept Israel’s unilateral annexation of Jerusalem following the 1967 war, which had since been declared illegal by a large majority of countries, including the United States.
Up to that point, Clinton had issued multiple executive waivers to keep the act at bay. The State Department had routinely argued the necessity of the waiver before Congress, on the grounds that compliance would pose a threat to U.S. national security interests vis-a-vis the ongoing Middle East peace process. In late 1999, when Congress tried to insert language to revise the act in order to eliminate Clinton’s waiver authority, it was Ross who led the charge the other way. Ross was furious to discover that Sandy Berger had been managing the politically dicey issue directly with Congress and the pro-Israeli lobby groups, including AIPAC, without first seeking his blessing, and he sought to convince his colleagues otherwise.
The consensus within the State Department to oppose the legislation was strong – even Martin Indyk felt it was a bad idea – but Ross, whose son had been working as an intern for Al Gore’s future running mate, Joe Lieberman, a co-sponsor of the act, nevertheless forged ahead against the wishes of the president, even commenting at one meeting with words to the effect of, “If the two sides can work other things out, I just don’t see why we can’t move the embassy to Jerusalem.” One State official who was present during the awkward moment recalls how “jaws dropped in the room,” after which he was harshly criticised. Ross, who reacted with eye-rolling arrogance, acted unimpressed with the opinions until Jon Schwartz, using his sharp legal wit, quickly took him to task. Ross was clearly outmatched and, to his own chagrin, President Clinton pressed ahead with the waiver, issuing it again on June 18, 2000.
The damage to Ross’s reputation was no longer confined to Foggy Bottom’s inner corridors. These internal workings were not known to the Palestinians, but as discussions over a summit progressed, they converged with multiple Palestinian expressions of a loss of confidence in Ross, citing a variety of reasons to almost anyone who would listen, including Congressional staffers and other State Department officials. It was later reported that Arafat raised this issue directly with Clinton himself before the Camp David summit, asking that he no longer employ Ross as a U.S. mediator.
Massing also doesn’t mention another reason AIPAC and friends were anti-Rabin.
pp. 63, 64
After he signed the Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Rabin knew that Syria could still play a spoiler role on the Israeli-Palestinian track. So, from late 1993 to early 1994, while the Israeli-Jordanian agreement was looming, Rabin sent Asad signals of conciliation, resulting in an event commonly referred to in Arab-Israeli diplomatic vernacular as the “Rabin deposit.”
On August 3, 1993, Rabin told U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher that “Israel is ready for full withdrawal from the Golan Heights provided its requirements on security and normalisation are met.” The United States recognised the seriousness of the offer, as full withdrawal would not only end hostilities between Israel and Syria but also pave the ground for normal relations between Syria and the United States, which views Syria (because of its support for Hezbollah) as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” At the personal request of Rabin, Christopher promptly relayed this message to Asad the following day. Asad was sceptical of the move until July 1994, when the Clinton administration provided him with confirmation that Rabin’s reference to “full withdrawal” could indeed be construed as a withdrawal consistent with Resolution 242, specifically, to the June 4, 1967, line.
For Syria, Rabin’s acknowledgment and willingness to define the reference of withdrawal as the June 4, 1967, line was a landmark. During Clinton’s first term, tripartite discussions on the basis of Rabin’s deposit advanced. Barak, too, had contributed significantly to the talks, as Rabin’s chief of staff and then his foreign minister. After Rabin’s 1995 assassination, discussions premised on “the deposit” continued under his immediate successor, Shimon Peres. But like every other constructive measure regarding Middle East peace, progress came to a virtual halt during the 1996-1999 term of Netanyahu.
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