For weeks the political heavyweight, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, sat on the sidelines. AIPAC refrained from taking a position on whether or not the United States should undertake a military strike against Syria. Its silence continued, even following confirmation of Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians. Then, suddenly, without warning, AIPAC announced it would come out swinging with both fists. And now we know why.
It was not a big surprise to watchers of major pro-Israel organizations that AIPAC remained silent on the question of whether the U.S. should use its force against a Middle Eastern dictator who – at the moment – was not directly threatening Israel.
At least one good reason why many pro-Israel organizations were reluctant to wade into this thicket is the inevitability that the story will then become that oh-so-popular refrain: the Jews are forcing American boys to die for them. Call that the Big Blame Theory. We’ll get back to it in a moment.
But after weeks of silence and nearly silent no-committals from the AIPAC behemoth, the word came several days ago that AIPAC had entered the hard-core lobbying front on behalf of President Obama’s “limited, tailored” strikes on Syria.
So what happened?
What happened is politics. No, not the Jews pushing the U.S. to fight Israel’s battles. This one was Team Obama calling in its own chits, and asking, nah, insisting that AIPAC wind-up its many operatives and get them to start pushing hard on their congressional contacts to throw in their yes vote for the Obama strikes.
At least, that’s what 23-plus year AIPAC veteran Steven J. Rosen wrote in the article, “Pushed on the Bandwagon,” appearing in the September 4th edition of the Middle East Quarterly.
Rosen’s article was long on specifics but short on sources.
Nevertheless, it is hard to believe he would write those specifics without having very sound reasons to believe them to be true. Rosen wrote about AIPAC’s desperate effort to ensure that no one would blame “the Jews” for pushing the U.S. into a war with Iraq: AIPAC never openly endorsed the authorization; AIPAC organized a letter from 16 members of congress swearing that AIPAC did not take an official position on the war and never lobbied them on the war; former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned George W. Bush that attacking Iraq was a mistake.
Of course, none of those efforts to prove non-participation bore any fruit. The Jews, by whatever name people chose to use – the Israel Lobby, the Jews, or the Neocons – were and still are blamed for pushing the U.S. into a massively unpopular war with Iraq. That’s the Big Blame Theory.
And so AIPAC was going to definitely, positively, absolutely stay out of this fight. As with Iraq, Syria is not the threat to Israel that Iran is. And AIPAC has always (at least until now) refrained from using its mighty political strength for any fight in which Israel is not directly threatened. But now all that has changed.
As Rosen put it,
Responding to a full-court press by the Obama administration — a call to Netanyahu, a direct message to AIPAC, and messages via congressional leaders — AIPAC has weighed in fully in support of the president’s call for intervention.
There are a myriad of responses to AIPAC’s appearance in the front line of the congressional battle on behalf of Obama’s Syrian Strike. Many analysts see only bad results for AIPAC and the pro-Israel world, no matter what happens.
It’s a classic example of heads you win, tails I lose. If congress authorizes Obama’s plan, and things go badly – who is going to be blamed? The Jews. If congress votes against Obama’s plan, AIPAC looks feeble, and loses credibility as well as having wasted political chits it would have preferred to save for when Israel is directly threatened.
Something Rosen doesn’t mention, but others do, is the awkward realization that although team Obama has apparently pushed hard on AIPAC to help bring in the votes for the president’s plan, other, more logical organizations have been immune from the importuning.