A new alliance, including financier George Soros and former Bill
Clinton advisor Jeremy Ben-Ami, aims to take on the powerful lobbyist
group AIPAC -- and reshape U.S. policy.


THE OTHER ISRAEL LOBBY
Gregory Levey
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/12/19/israellobby/


This past June, on my last day working as a speechwriter for the
Israeli government -- first at the United Nations and then in the
prime minister's office -- I met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in
his private office at the Israeli parliament to discuss a speech he
had just given to the U.S. Congress. The speech, which I helped write,
was largely about the future of U.S.-Israeli relations, and we
discussed how it had gone over. Also at the meeting was a high-ranking
official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and when we left the
building together, he told me that the next day officials from the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful lobbying group,
would be visiting. He asked if I had any suggestions about what to
tell them about how they could more effectively help Israel in
Washington.

"Some people would say that maybe the best thing would be for them not
to be so reflexively pro-Israel on every issue," I said.

He laughed. "Well, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon,"
he said. I suggested that such a rebalancing might be beneficial for
all who were interested in supporting Israel, and he conceded that,
yes, "just maybe" it would.

Many American Jews, it seems, have similar feelings. Eighty-seven
percent of them voted Democratic in the recent midterms -- the highest
number since 1994 -- belying the oft-repeated claim that the Bush
administration's staunch support for Israel would move the
traditionally Democratic Jewish vote toward the Republicans. The fact
is that most American Jews, and many other American supporters of
Israel, do not see eye-to-eye on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with
the most hawkish, knee-jerk Israel supporters in the U.S. government
-- even if their presumed leadership, represented by AIPAC, often
appears to do so. Moreover, AIPAC's influence in Washington may soon
begin to decline, as a powerful new alliance of left-leaning friends
of Israel has begun to emerge, with the express aim of reshaping U.S.
strategy on the region's most intractable problem.

If the Bush administration decides to seriously reevaluate its
strategy in the Middle East in the wake of the Iraq Study Group's
recent report -- and among its recommendations is prioritizing a
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- it will have to deal
with a minefield of interest groups. That will surely include AIPAC, a
juggernaut that the New York Times has called the "most important
organization affecting America's relationship with Israel."

In "The Israel Lobby," their highly controversial article earlier this
year, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer argued that AIPAC, along with
a very wide array of allies, pushes American foreign policy inflexibly
in a pro-Israel direction. The article was criticized as simplistic,
sloppy and above all reductive, but in its core suggestion that AIPAC
often hinders the American government's ability to freely maneuver in
the Middle East, it is difficult to argue with. As AIPAC itself
proudly reports, the organization is "consistently ranked as the most
influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill," and
it uses this influence to very successfully push a viewpoint that its
critics claim puts Israel's total military dominance above efforts to
broker Middle East peace.

AIPAC suffered a relatively small but symbolic defeat this past year
-- one that may prove to have been a turning point. Earlier in the
year, AIPAC put all its muscle behind a congressional bill called the
Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which even some pro-Israel observers
called "draconian." Going beyond even the Bush administration's own
hard-line stance on the Hamas-led Palestinian government, it would
have essentially cut off all American contact with any element of the
Palestinian leadership, and hampered the U.S. government's ability to
strengthen Palestinian moderates.

A group of small, left-leaning Jewish lobby groups, including the
Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace and the
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, banded together to battle
AIPAC on the issue, and in the end were successful. A watered-down
version of the bill was passed, with what they saw as the problematic
language stripped away. An AIPAC official recently told me that AIPAC
was satisfied with the softer bill's passage -- but it is quite clear
that the incident represented a defeat for the organization.

It was, in fact, an impressive demonstration of what political
cooperation and grass-roots advocacy can do. However, for these groups
to replicate that success on a larger scale and with more of a
substantive effect on U.S. foreign policy, there is a key missing
element: real money.

That is where billionaire financier George Soros may come in, along
with a group of other left-leaning philanthropists, many of them
Jewish. In the relatively close-knit Middle East lobbying community,
it is something of an open secret that this past September, Morton
Halperin, who served in both the Nixon and Clinton administrations and
is now director of U.S. advocacy for Soros' Open Society Institute,
met with a group of lobbyists, political strategists and former
politicians who are seeking to create a new well-funded,
well-organized, left-leaning Israel lobby, as an alternative to AIPAC.

Next page: Listening to right-leaning lobbyists plan a harsh response
to a court ruling against Israel's separation barrier

Several key figures in this group had been active in the effort to
quash the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, and include Jeremy Ben-Ami,
a former advisor to President Clinton, and Daniel Levy, a former
special advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and now a senior
fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington.

The group's first meeting was exploratory and unfocused, according to
several attendees who spoke with me. But in late October, Soros
himself attended a follow-up meeting, along with liquor magnates Edgar
and Charles Bronfman, former Democratic Rep. Mel Levine and others.
The idea -- by this point labeled the "Soros Initiative" -- now began
to gain traction and substance, with large sums of money being pledged
by several parties. Several people involved have told me that there is
now almost enough money firmly on the table to launch the new
organization -- an eight-figure dollar amount, they say, and that's
just for starters. Several people have told me that there is already
work in progress to establish the organization's core structure and
operations.

What exactly would the new organization do? According to Diane Balser,
a board member of the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, one of
the small left-wing groups involved in the discussions, the goal is
clear: "Organizing systematically to affect U.S. foreign policy."
Levy, the former Barak advisor, explained that the movement is "coming
from a place where inside the mainstream Jewish community, people are
increasingly confused about something that describes itself as
pro-Israel, but is so out of sync with what they believe are good
politics for the U.S. or Israel."

"The right-wing orientation in the community is losing people by the
droves, particularly young people," M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel
Policy Forum, one of the main groups involved, added. "Most U.S. Jews
support peace in the Middle East, and don't want to shoot down doves
anytime they appear."

The point of the initiative, Levy told me, is not to "turn American
policy against Israel. It is to reach out to groups of philanthropists
to get better resources and better focus and to translate this into a
political statement," so that members of Congress will know that they
"will have cover if they seek to do what we and many in the American
Jewish Community think is right."

There has been talk before about establishing an alternative to the
status quo represented by AIPAC, but the added element of money from
Soros and others could prove the pivotal difference now. There is also
the possibility that a connection to Soros could itself be
problematic. Soros has never been at all friendly to Israel, and his
involvement might scare off others who are left-leaning but still
support Israel. He is also one of the major funders of MoveOn.org and
other left-wing causes, and Republican lawmakers, and even some
centrist Democrats, may not want to be associated with him. An AIPAC
insider repeatedly stressed to me that one reason this new group will
never be able to compete with AIPAC is because AIPAC is bipartisan,
while what he called the "Soros connection" shows that the new group
will not be.

Levy, meanwhile, said that it is "a misnomer" even to call it the
"Soros Initiative," because, as one of his allies said, it's not
"Soros' baby. He doesn't want to be out front on it."

The AIPAC insider said that he believes the "Soros Initiative" is
little more than a fundraising drive to raise money for some
impoverished organizations that "have to define themselves in
opposition to something." In fact, say those involved, a contentious
issue in the discussions is exactly how much the new organization
would allow itself to be seen as being in direct opposition to AIPAC.
At least four of the players involved have told me that they intend to
be an "alternative," but not an "opposition." Still, one of those
present at the early meetings said that he sees his organization as
"the anti-AIPAC." Levy, meanwhile, said simply that if "there are
differences in policy, those will be expressed in one group advocating
one thing and another advocating another thing." This would at least
be an improvement, he said, over the past, when Israeli leaders who
honestly sought to make peace "pulled their hair out because of the
lack of support from the Jewish community in the United States."

I can attest from personal experience that Levy likely picked up this
sense of frustration from working in the Israeli government. Once,
when I was still a speechwriter for the Israeli government at the
U.N., I sat in on a meeting with a group of right-leaning American
Jewish lobbyists who were discussing how harshly to react to the
International Court of Justice's ruling that Israel's separation
barrier was illegal.

Afterward, a senior strategist for the Israeli government said to me,
"See, people inside the Israeli government who are sincerely looking
for peace have no choice but to wait. This prime minister is not going
to bring peace. This ambassador is not going to bring peace." He
added, "And those people that we just met are sure as hell not going
to bring peace."

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