What Defeating the American-Israel Political Action Committee Means, on the Ground

AIPAC and Me, Part I (a series?)

With the struggle heating up to unhorse the influence of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee as a bottomlessly corrosive influence in American politics, and maddeningly determined hindrance to and global security, justice, and equality, I thought people would be interested in some historical context from my 2020 book Reaganland. The excerpts below both attest to one of the most seductively dangerous ideologies now regnant in American and world politics: that redeeming the slaughter of six million Jews in an attempt to exterminate them justifies special moral consideration for the state of Israel when it comes to its blatant serial human rights abuses and upending of the security of the Middle East and therefore the globe. That ideology is politically and morally —and even geostratically if that’s the sort of thing you’re into—bankrupt.

(Spiritually , too. See in particular the so-called “614th Commandment,” the theologically barren pseudo-religious formulation of Rabbi Emil Fackenheimer that “Thou shalt not grant Hitler a posthumous victory.” I would love to ask this particular unclear-on-the-concept man of God how you can make space for the Divine in your head when you’ve already rented it all out to Hitler.)

Anyway, the basic grounding of my ideas on this were well articulated by Hannah Arendt, as exquisitely explicated recently by John Ganz. I am thrilled to see these ideas begin to thrive recently, including in the recent Democratic Senate primary in Michigan.

So, to the texts.

Excerpt One is about how AIPAC, basically, tried to sabotage President Carter’s diplomatic moves to get Egypt and Israel to the negotiating table, which eventually resulted, despite AIPAC’s efforts, in the Camp David Accords. Carter had proposed to sell fighter jets for the first time to Saudi Arabia, as an inducement for them to help broker the talks. The most relevant oart—beginning in the middle of the page, with “Then on Monday….—is AIPAC’s lobbying strategy to make the argument that an Arab country shouldn’t get this weapons by sending each member of Congress a certain book…

The second passage (beginning at “Another recent unusual episode…”) is about what happened one time after Ronald Reagan accepted an award from two politically prominent Jewish Community leaders, Republican Max Rabb and Democrat Max Kampelman, not long after a proposal at a Reagan campaign strategy session that what the candidate said about Middle East policy could help them with “financial support.” (It is an original historical reconstructions from primary documents. If anyone is interested in hearing me nerd out about how I do that work, give a shout and I’ll do a post on that, reproducing the docs.)

Note how this particular project was treated by the campaign with an investment of energy and political sensitivity invested incomparably greater than for any other issue I encountered in the files. And, note how the deliberations end: with the future 40th President of the United States implicitly announcing in the Washington Post that Israeli’s military annexation of conquered territory need by no concern of his, after a first draft attesting to his grave concern about that very issue—before, that is, their consultation with the Zionist supporters on whose behalf the op-ed was written, to whom they appear to have granted veto power, policy-wise.

Not an “antisemitism” thing, by the way, given that the account of the Israel op-ed succeeds one about Reagan renting out his friendship with an aerospace exec to the Mexican government. No, these aren’t documentation of a conspiracy. They’re a documentation of rich people buying bad public policy that makes the world less free, fair, law-governed, and safe. Thank fucking God that, when it comes to Israel, it’s finally starting to stop.