The year of 2014 is starting well for the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier organization of this
country’s Israel lobby.
Not only has it been clearly
and increasingly decisively defeated – at least for now and the immediate future
– in its bid to persuade a filibuster-proof, let alone a veto-proof,
super-majority of senators to approve the Kirk-Menendez
“Wag the Dog” Act that was designed to torpedo the Nov. 24 “Joint Plan of
Action” (JPA) between Iran and the P5+1. It has also drawn a spate of remarkably
unfavorable publicity, a particularly damaging development for an organization
that, as one of its former top honchos, Steve
Rosen, once put it, like “a night flower, … thrives in the dark and dies in
the sun.”
Consider first what happened
with the Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill, named for the two
biggest beneficiaries of “pro-Israel” PACs closely associated with AIPAC in
the Congressional campaigns of 2010 and 2012, respectively. Introduced on the
eve of the Christmas recess, the bill then had 26 co-sponsors, equally divided
between Democrats and Republicans, giving it an attractive bipartisan cast – the
kind of bipartisanship that AIPAC has long sought to maintain despite the
group’s increasingly Likudist orientation and the growing disconnect within the
Democratic Party between its strongly pro-Israel elected leadership and more
skeptical base, especially its younger activists, both Jewish and gentile. By
the second week of January, it had accumulated an additional 33 co-sponsors,
bringing the total to 59 and theoretically well within striking distance of the
magic 67 needed to override a presidential veto. At that point, however, its
momentum stalled as a result of White House pressure (including warnings that a
veto would indeed be cast); the alignment behind Obama of ten Senate Committee
chairs, including Carl Levin of the Armed Services Committee and Dianne
Feinstein of the Intelligence Committee; public denunciation of the bill by key
members of the foreign
policy elite; and a remarkably strong grassroots campaign by several
reputable national religious, peace, and human-rights groups (including, not
insignificantly, J Street and Americans for Peace Now), whose phone calls and
emails to Senate offices opposing the bill outnumbered those in favor by a
factor of ten or more.
The result: AIPAC and its
supporters hit a brick wall at 59, unable even to muster the 60 needed to invoke
cloture against a possible filibuster, let alone the 77 senators that
AIPAC-friendly Congressional staff claimed at one point were either publicly or
privately committed to vote for the bill if it reached the floor. By late this
week, half a dozen of the 16 Democrats who had co-sponsored the bill were retreating
from it as fast as their senatorial dignity would permit. And while none has yet
disavowed their co-sponsorship, more than a handful now have (disingenuously, in
my view) insisted that they either don’t believe that the bill should be voted
on while negotiations are ongoing; that they had never intended to undercut the
president’s negotiating authority; or, most originally, that they believed the
mere introduction of the bill would provide additional leverage to Obama (Michael Bennet of Colorado) in the negotiations. Even the
bill’s strongest proponents, such as Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe, conceded, as he did
to the National Journal after Obama repeated his veto threat in his State of the Union
Address Tuesday: “The question is, is there support to override a veto on that?
I say, ‘No.’”
The Democratic retreat is
particularly worrisome for AIPAC precisely because its claim to “bipartisanship”
is looking increasingly dubious, a point underlined by Peter Beinart in a
Haaretz op-ed this week that
urged Obama to boycott this year’s AIPAC policy conference that will take place
a mere five weeks from now. (This is the nightmare scenario for Rosen who noted
in an interview with the JTA’s Ron Kampeas last week that the group’s failure to
procure a high-level administration speaker for its annual conference “would be
devastating to AIPAC’s image of bipartisanship.”) According to
Beinart:
