National Press Club Conference Proceedings | April 10, 2015

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NATIONAL PRESS CLUB CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS A Special Supplement to the

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+ Years of Telling the Truth

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SHIMON PERES: WHEN THE GODS LAUGH IN MEMORIAM: HELEN THOMAS (1920-2013)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1

“The Israel Lobby: Is It Good for the U.S.?

Is It Good for Israel?”

IntroductIon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

WelcomIng remarks Dale Sprusansky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Panel 1: What Is the Israel lobby and How does It Work? moderator grant F. smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

How Big Is the Lobby and What Does It Do? An Overview of the 501(c) Universe—Grant F. Smith . . . . . 5 From the Jewish National Fund to Jewish Voice for Peace and BDS—seth morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 The ADL: Covert Action, Censure, and Courting Law Enforcement—Jeffrey Blankfort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 QUESTIONS & ANSWErS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Panel 2: are critical Voices silenced? moderator askia muhammad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Weakening and Discrediting the U.N.: The Work of Pro-Israel NGOs. Prof. richard Falk . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Silencing Voices That Question Israeli Actions. dr. alice rothchild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 The Use of Cultural Stereotypes to Shape Policy. dr. Jack shaheen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 QUESTIONS & ANSWErS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Panel 3: Is Freedom of speech encouraged on american campuses? moderator Helena cobban . . . 30

Daring to Speak Out on Campus. amani al-khatahtbeh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Pressures on Universities to Discipline and Punish Students and Faculty for Speech Activities. dima khalidi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Overcoming Obstacles: SJP Successes. ahmad saadaldin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 QUESTIONS & ANSWErS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Panel 4: Is the lobby good for Israel? moderator delinda Hanley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

How the Lobby Enables Israeli Policy: Views of an Israeli in America. miko Peled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Does Unconditional Support for Israel Endanger Israeli Voices? gideon levy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 The Situation of Arab Citizens of Israel: Views of a Palestinian Citizen of Israel. Huwaida arraf . . . . . . . 50 QUESTIONS & ANSWErS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Panel 5: How does the lobby Influence congress? moderator Janet mcmahon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Is It All About the Money? m.J. rosenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 My Experience With the Israel Lobby; The Use of Dark Money. Former rep. nick rahall (d-WV) . . . . 60 How to Tame Lobbies Like AIPAC. Former rep. Paul Findley (r-Il) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 QUESTIONS & ANSWErS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Panel 6: Is there an Iraq-Iran continuum? moderator dale sprusansky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

The Push for War on Iran. gareth Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 The Iran Nuclear Deal. reza marashi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 AIPAC/Netanyahu Objectives regarding the Iran Nuclear Issue. dr. Paul Pillar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 QUESTIONS & ANSWErS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 The Israel Lobby Conference

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BOOKS BY SPEAKERS

2

Th The e IIsrael srael Lobby Lobby Is It Good Good for the the US? US? Is Is It It Good Good for for Israel?

Is r a el?

Books Bo oks by

by Conference Conference S Speakers peakers $14

T h e P u n i s h m e n t o f G a z a by G Gideon ideon Le Levy vy

$14

The General’s Son: Journey of an Miko Peled I s r a e l i i n P a l e s t i n e by M ik o P e le d

$18

Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope Richard A.. FFalk

by R ichard A a lk

$16

On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion

by Alice Alice Rothchild Rothchild

$15

Voices Across the Divide: Interviews with Palestinians in the U.S. Alice Rothchild

by A lic e R othchild ((DVD) DVD)

$15

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a P e o p l e (DVD) (DVD)

$22

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a P e o p l e by Jack Jack Shaheen Shaheen

$15

Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs A f t e r 9 / 1 1 by Jack Jack Shaheen Shaheen

$22

A is for Arab: Archiving Stereotypes in Shaheen U . S . P o p u l a r C u l t u r e by JJack ack S haheen

$17

Peace Under Fire: Israel, Palestine and the International Solidarity Movement Huwaida Arraf

by H uwaida A rraf eet. t. aal.l.

$22

Speaking Out: A Congressman’s Lifelong Fight Against Bigotry, Famine, Paul a n d W a r by P aul FFindley indley

$12

They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby Paul

by P aul FFindley indley

$10

Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts About the U.S.-Israeli Relationship

by Paul Paul Findley Findley

$15

Paul Findley: Courage to Speak Out (DVD) (D VD)

$22

Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story Gareth Porter o f t h e I r a n N u c l e a r S c a r e by G a r e th P orter

$16

D i v e r t ! by Grant Grant Smith S m it h

$14

Spy Trade: How Israel’s Lobby Undermines America’s Economy Grant Smith

by G rant S m it h

$14

A m e r i c a ’ s D e f e n s e L i n e by G Grant rant S Smith m it h

$14

Foreign Agents: AIPAC from 1963-2005

by Grant Grant Smith S m it h

$22

Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform Paul Pillar

by P aul P illa r

$20

The National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship” 2014 (DVD) (D VD)

Order Or der Your Your Copies Copies Today!

Today !

www. m id d le e a s t b o o k s .c o m www.middleeastbooks.com Washington Report on Middle East Affairs–Special Supplement

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INTRODUCTION

W

Introduction

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Publisher: Managing Editor:

ashington Report on Middle East Affairs readers who missed the “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the US? Is It Good for Israel?” conference asked us to put the highlights of the April 10, 2015 gathering into an article for our next issue.

We tried—but discovered that all the presentations were highlights!

Conference organizers the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report, asked carefully selected speakers to give 18-minute talks, the length of a “Ted Talk,” and, frankly, their remarks blew us away.

Many of our panelists spent a lifetime studying the pro-Israel Lobby. Others ran into the power of the Lobby accidentally as they worked on Capitol Hill, at the State Department or at the U.N. Some, especially students, were taken aback to discover its power in preventing their free speech on college campuses. A number of speakers who grew up proud of their Jewish heritage said they became deeply disillusioned by a Lobby that does not represent their views. Israelis told the audience that the Lobby was also damaging their country.

This is a conversation most Americans avoid, even those who care deeply about Israel’s influence on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. No one wants to be accused of antiSemitism, and that’s just what happens to those who “dare to speak out” or even to question Israel’s Lobby or actions on behalf of a foreign country.

As one of our speakers emphasized, Israel is not a religion. It’s not a race. It’s a country.

And it’s OK—it’s not anti-Semitic— to talk about and even criticize a country we support financially and diplomatically.

Our speakers helped to shine a light on the Lobby’s activities because, as M.J. Rosenberg noted during his talk, “The Israel Lobby thrives in the dark and shrivels in the sunlight.”

But that light was too hot for U.S. corporate media, which won’t touch the topic with a 10foot pole.

America’s press decided to continue to keep citizens in the dark and not mention a word about this groundbreaking discussion of the Lobby. After spending days covering the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s conference and its push for war on Iran, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s controversial speech before Congress, and Israel’s elections—there was not one sound bite from this conference.

One of the only stories about the event to make it into print was written by speaker Gideon Levy—about whom Rosenberg said, “If Gideon Levy worked in the United States, the Lobby would have him fired. There is no question about that”—and published April 12 in his Israeli daily Haaretz. Levy’s headline was hopeful: “The Beginning of the American Spring.” He pointed out, “This was not the Saban Forum, nor the AIPAC Policy Conference: This was the other America.”

Levy concluded, “Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship, in which the United States will finally dare to criticize and put pressure on Israel? It’s too soon to tell. In the meantime, the American Spring is making the cherry trees bloom….”

The American Spring won’t take place until its citizens begin to have frank discussions about the unchecked power of lobbies, including the Israel Lobby.

As you read these game-changing talks, we hope you’ll begin to hold some conversations of your own, so that, together, we can usher in the American Spring.

For more information, or to watch these presentations, please visit <www.IsraelLobbyUS.org> or purchase a DVD (see p. 43) from MiddleEastBooks.com.

We’re determined to build on the momentum of this year’s conference and spread the word to more and more Americans. We hope you’ll join us! ■

News Editor: Assistant Editor: Middle East Books and More Director: Finance & Admin.

Director: Art Director: Executive Editor:

ANDREW I. KILLGORE JANET McMAHON DELINDA C. HANLEY DALE SPRUSANSKY KEVIN A. DAVIS CHARLES R. CARTER RALPH U. SCHERER RICHARD H. CURTISS (1927-2013)

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The Israel Lobby Conference

Printed in the USA

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PANEL 1: What Is the Israel Lobby and How Does It Work?

PANEL 1

What Is the Israel Lobby and How Does It Work?

D

Welcoming Remarks

Grant F. Smith

Moderator

ale Sprusansky: Good morning everyone. I’m Dale Sprusansky. I’m the assistant editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The Washington Report is co-hosting today’s event with the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. I’d like to give you a warm welcome. Thank you for coming out early today, perhaps before the rain starts. You’re wise people.

My job is to do some housekeeping for today’s event.

This event is being live-streamed on our website, so questions can be submitted on Twitter @IsraelLobbyUS… Lots of our authors will be signing books later today, throughout the day [see p. 2]. The book signing schedule can be found on the back of your program. If you’d like to re-watch something or share this event with friends and family, it will be online on our website within 24 hours and transcripts will be up shortly after that.

I am going to introduce Grant Smith, who will be moderating and speaking on the first panel, “What is the Israel Lobby and How Does it Work?” Grant is the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, or IRmep—again, one of the co-sponsors of today’s event. He is the author of several books on the Israel Lobby and its various activities. He also recently has been engaged in several lawsuits with the Department of Defense and the CIA in an effort to get information on Israel’s nuclear weapons program released. With that, Grant will take the reins.

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Grant F. Smith: How Big Is the Lobby and What Does It Do? An Overview of the 501(c) Universe

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How Big Is the Lobby and What Does It Do? An Overview of the 501(c) Universe Grant F. Smith

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Grant F. Smith: I want to start with a story, and then I’ll introduce our other speakers, and that is about one of those lawsuits.

On Feb. 10, the Department of Defense released a document, “Critical Technology Issues [Assessment] in Israel,” that unequivocally confirms for the first time from a U.S. government source that Israel has an advanced nuclear weapons program and national laboratories equivalent to our Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, and that the Soreq reactor, a gift of “Atoms for Peace” under the Eisenhower administration, has “the technology base required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.”

This [FOIA] process was 1,132 days and another 140 days in federal court.

As many of you know, and this is one reason we’re repeating so many of these loops [videos shown during conference registration] about nuclear weapons, we do have modifications to our Foreign Aid Act of 1961, the Symington and Glenn Amendments that occurred in the mid-’70s, which explicitly prohibit U.S. foreign aid to countries trafficking in nuclear weapons technologies outside of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And so our question must be, “How much are Americans at this point owed for all of the aid that was delivered on false pretexts?”

This amounts to $234 billion, as of today, and if there are 122 million U.S. taxpayers, our average refund per taxpayer is that figure up on the screen: $1,909.54. So the question is, as the video says, why do presidents deny this weapons program exists? Why does the press underreport it?

In this game, as in many games, if you’re looking at a con develop, and you can’t figure out who the mark is, or the victim, that’s because it’s you!

In this case, “strategic ambiguity,” as it’s called, is a farce masquerading as grand strategy that started back during the Nixon administration. In 2014, the ISCAP, which is the highest declas-

sification authority in the United States, overruled and released information about the Nixon-Meir negotiations, in which Nixon’s feelings that he would have “a Zionist campaign to try to undermine” him if he did not agree to this gag policy is clear at this point.

Israel claims it won’t be the first to introduce. Our presidents won’t comment on it. Whistleblowers are punished by Department of Energy regulations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is undermined, and taxpayers are both abused and uninformed.

And it’s not like they don’t know. The question to ask is, “who’s being fooled?”

In a Google Consumer Survey last year, a majority of Americans, almost 64 percent, said that they believe the Israelis have a nuclear weapons program. So they’re not being fooled. And it’s a testament to the power of Israel lobbying organizations in this country that a policy costing so much can last for so long.

So what I’d like to talk about are one portion of activist organizations, which I call “Israel Affinity Organizations,” which is a taxexempt portion of this lobbying ecosystem.

And just to define that a little bit more, we’re going to look at 350 organizations, we’re going to look at when they were formed, we’re going to look at some of their major functional categories, and what could happen in the future as they continue to grow in terms of revenue and resources.

So every organization I’m talking about, in aggregate, has to be either a 501(c)(3) or (4) organization which has unconditional support for Israel as a top priority. It is headquartered in the U.S. And it’s retaining its tax-exempt status. Again, that’s almost 350 organizations—but it’s not the whole picture.

In terms of the whole picture, we realize that (in blue) we have this darker and darker puzzle [piece] called bundling campaign contributions that are premised on support for Israel. In red we know there are captive media organizations. We know that the The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 1: What Is the Israel Lobby and How Does It Work?

Brookings Saban Center is a carve-out of that organization that is very pro-Israel. Not counted. Churches and synagogues, not counted. Just the green portion, which is the puzzle piece that we’re looking at right now.

The first data extract reveals—in terms of the time they were incorporated or received tax-exempt status—there are four great waves. Number one, the wave asking for approval of Zionism and promotion of Zionism and immigration. Phase two, state building, the creation of fund-raising organizations, the big transfer organizations and subsidy organizations came into play. The ’80s and ’90s are a period of the media watch and think tanks, the off-splitting of the Washington Institute from the mother ship AIPAC. And the fourth wave, I like to talk [about as] the attack, lawfare and campus monitoring and messaging are the top priorities of these organizations. And later on in the program, there’ll be a lot of people talking about Israeli activity on campus.

It is interesting that half of the organizations surveyed, which are the biggest, were created before 1975, and half of them were created after 1975. This is interesting because it coincides with the period in which the Justice Department, after trying to get the Zionist Organization of America to register as a foreign agent seven times, after ordering the American Zionist Council to register as a foreign agent, only to see the lobbying division AIPAC split off six weeks later and start the same activities—they threw in the towel.

And so the number of organizations exploded, as did the amount of U.S. foreign aid, the blue line, in terms of their lobbying successes. So there’s this blossoming of foreign aid that occurs right after DOJ threw in the towel.

The demands of these organizations, if you review tens of thousands of Nexis [and] Lexis pages, have evolved over time from simple recognition to the much more troublesome trade concessions—of course our first foreign [free] trade agreement was with Israel—terrorism designations of Israel’s enemies and, finally, calls for U.S. military action against Israel’s enemies.

So these four “great waves” of Israel Affinity Organizations leave us asking, “What will be the next great wave?”

I call the last one the “imposition” wave, in which we’re imposed [upon], told how to think on campus, told what Americans think by The Israel Project and its dubious polls. Told what’s legal and not by the Lawfare Project on campus.

These campaigns have been so highly successful, because Americans are fooled.

In fact right now most Americans, according to a Google Consumer Survey that we took last fall, statistically significant, 58.5 percent think Iran already has nuclear weapons, right now. So just like the run up to the war on Iraq, where Saddam was believed to be involved in 9/11, involved in possibly having weapons of mass destruction, we’re at that point right now in terms of Iran.

And who can blame them?

With terrifying videos, this is a clip of the Clarion video called “Iranium” which shows us these menacing Iranian boats off the eastern seaboard launching nuclear SCUD missiles into the United States.

If I receive that, watch it, and believe it, of course I think Iran has nuclear weapons.

So, in aggregate, the total revenue of these 350 organizations has been growing. It suffered a bump, obviously, during 2008. In 2012 it was $3.7 billion a year. The total charitable sector in the U.S. is about $350 billion dollars. That’s growing at 4 percent per year. On average, Israel Affinity Organizations are growing at 5 percent, and that makes a big difference over the long run.

At present, in aggregate, this sector of 350 organizations with Israel as a top priority are right behind the United Way, the largest tax-exempt organization, and right ahead of the Red Cross.

So we’re talking about serious money, and a very cogent set of different categories of activities.

So I’m going to break them down into subsidy, fund-raising and local political action, the advocacy organizations and education/training, and look at their changes over time (see chart on facing page).

The base of this pyramid are the organizations that collect revenue, tax-exempt, and send it to Israel, send it as “American Friends” organizations, American Friends of Technion, etc., etc., and ship it overseas.

The second level, fund-raising and local political action, are the federations and JCRCs, then we have advocacy organizations like AIPAC, and finally education organizations.

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Grant F. Smith: How Big Is the Lobby and What Does It Do? An Overview of the 501(c) Universe

So these subsidy organizations represent about 100 organizations, the largest category members are the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and these organizations are basically very much active in collecting and transferring revenue.

The second level of the pyramid is much more interesting. It’s the “fund-raising and local political action” organizations. There are 152 federations raising large amounts through local fundraising campaigns. Most major fund-raising organizations are federations. They give to local Jewish and non-Jewish recipients.

But they’re also giving large amounts in direct transfers to Israel.

And their community relations councils are highly active politically, highly active media watchdogs, and also lobby for local, city and state initiatives.

The General Assembly rivals AIPAC, except it’s a much more comfortable high-profile gathering of pundits from the media, friendly government officials, etc.

They are forming more interesting, robust miniAIPACs in each state, such as the JPAC of California, which is lobbying effectively at the state level.

And although they always claim on their websites that they are not official sponsors of AIPAC events, and other political events, they are very active in pushing that national agenda down.

Close up, if you look at a foundation in greater Los Angeles, they paid out $50 million in grants, $6.6 [million] in transfers to Israeli organizations, another $3.8 million to some of these other newer media watchdogs, Birthright Israel, which organizes trips, The Israel Project, which does research, and money for lobbying to the JPAC of California.

If you’re not involved in any of this, the tax impact is still clear. It creates about a $7.8 million hole that others will have to fill.

And there are some interesting “test cases” going on here locally, about getting U.S. taxpayers to pay for what was traditionally paid for by the organizations, such as a million dollars in funds for building a new Hillel on campus, instead of having the organization pay for it, taxpayers are paying for it after lobbying by JCRC. In terms of media watch, this is the kind of thing they watch out for. This single picture of a Palestinian father who was grieving his dead child, [a campaign] was organized against the ombudsman to make sure that this “anti-Israeli bias” would not be shown on the front page.

The Israel Action Center’s media communications organizations are very active through JCRCs.

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The website of the [national umbrella] federation boasts of their coverage, they claim 152 of these with the JCRCs embedded and not separately reporting taxes or lobbying expenses, but very active in terms of lobbying.

Advocacy is everything else. The large organizations that claim to represent these networks, that lobby Congress, get legislation passed, and essentially work to censure unfavorable press and buff up Israel’s image.

If we look at what they’re fighting, they’re not really fighting other organizations. What they’re fighting is public opinion. In a fall survey, 60.7 percent of Americans, when being advised of the relative levels of aid to Israel, said they did not support the current levels of aid. It was either “much too much,” or “too much.”

So it takes a lot of money to get increasing, in many cases, annual aid [to Israel] in the face of massive public opinion that’s passive, but very clear in polling.

Here’s another poll. We took this last week. Representative, statistically significant Google Consumer Research.

Here’s the poll question: “Congress and state legislatures pass scores of resolutions condemning Palestinians and voicing unconditional support for Israel every year.”

Two [responses]: These resolutions do not represent my views. These resolutions represent my views. They were randomly reversed.

Almost 70 percent of Americans say, “These don’t represent my views.”

So it takes real money to pass these in state legislatures, in the Congress, in the face of this passive, but very significant, opposition.

So the education and training/indoctrination segment of Israel Affinity Groups and Organizations is really involved in training within the community, Zionist education. For the American public, it’s about Holocaust museums. For law enforcement, it’s about getting the ADL into law enforcement to train them on counterterrorism. And so it’s an effort that’s collecting about $317 million in 2012, with 14 major Israel Affinity Organizations propelling that.

Most Americans, again in broader scope according to a 2014 Chicago Council survey, don’t take one side or the other when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And so it takes real money, real political power to overcome what has been showing up in poll after poll after poll of the general American public.

And so that’s why I think, when you look at the growth of the education segment of Israel Affinity Organizations, that’s been the fastest-growing segment since 2001. 108 percent over the time The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 1: What Is the Israel Lobby and How Does It Work?

period between 2001 and 2012, with subsidy organizations growing at 62 percent, advocacy at 72 percent.

So there’s this real effort to reach youngsters, younger and younger, where they are, which is in social media and online, to give them the favorable views that many older Americans have.

And it looks like that will continue to be a priority in terms of spending over the future toward the end of the decade as well.

In terms of employment and volunteers, 14,000 people are on the payroll of organizations that have promoting unconditional support for Israel as a major goal, 353,000 volunteers. And I’ve listed some of the bigger ones in order, but I would like to go on to what the future portends.

And in this case I think it is going to get worse before it gets better.

Israel affinity group revenue is growing quickly, more quickly than overall charitable donations, between 2001-2012. We expect that a strong economy, fund-raising appeals and the acceleration

with foreign governments, and bringing that in as a domestic political issue.

We’ve had espionage investigations against AIPAC, the ADL, the Weizmann Institute, they were all quashed by political pressure.

The U.S. Treasury Department has never pulled tax-exempt status for any reason more innocuous than failure to file.

And yet the charitable purpose of these organizations is dubious. The American Israel Education Foundation, which was granted tax-exempt status as an education organization in ‘89, is supposed to educate Americans about the Middle East. And it said, “All research produced and published will be made available to the general public.”

Well, it never has been. They don’t even have a website with more than one page, and that thing was put up a year ago.

Their observable activities are taking members of Congress on trips to Israel. A thousand of them between 2000-2015 and their

[in fund-raising] since 2008 is going to increase that growth to 9 percent, and it’s worth tracking for one reason.

Israel aid is a domestic political issue. It has nothing to do with U.S. national security. It has nothing to do with protecting the United States. It is purely a political issue, and it shows up in the numbers, because aid to Israel closely tracks the amount of spending of Israel affinity organizations. When it goes up, aid goes up. When it goes down, aid goes down. It is highly correlated, and so I can say with confidence, especially with President Obama making noises of conciliation after this initial Iran agreement, that there will be more aid—secret and public—in the future.

And so we see, probably toward the end of the decade, $3.5 billion in [yearly] aid increasing to $7 billion a year if this trend of correlation between fund-raising, sort of a symbol of political support, and aid continues. They are closely related. I would urge, however, every American to insist on getting their $1,900 back before this happens.

Finally, I want to talk about agency regulatory capture. I already mentioned the Justice Department threw in the towel, it does not enforce laws on the books about foreign agency and consorting

family members. Providing tax-deductible contributions for AIPAC education, what I would call a “disinformation campaign.”

A secret source gave us their latest briefing book. And it’s essentially a list of points, which, if you read it ahead of Netanyahu’s speech, and his claims, you’d see that the same claims are in this briefing book to Congress.

That there really is no negotiation to be done over Jerusalem, that because Congress recognizes it in resolutions, they are no longer subject to debate.

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Seth Morrison: From the Jewish National Fund to Jewish Voice for Peace and BDS

And so it’s really interesting to thumb through that thing and see that it’s really not education.

AIPAC, again, has the same sort of problem in terms of where it came from and when.

They were incorporated in 1963, six weeks after their parent was shut down. Their tax-exempt organization application in ‘67 was for a charitable education and religious association, but they’ve been lobbying, just like their parent, and have never been called on the extremely tight coordination with the Israeli government, they’ve never been prosecuted for obtaining, on three occasions, classified information to lobby against American industries

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and pass a free trade agreement, missile secrets to overturn sales to allies.

And they refuse to register under FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act], even though they are a successor [to the American Zionist Council], the Justice Department is uninterested in that.

So, I would just have to say, in conclusion, that studying the movements of these organizations provides a real insight into the future.

Our next two panelists will provide a level of detail that’s even greater in terms of their observations, inside and outside of these organizations. ■

From the Jewish National Fund to Jewish Voice for Peace and BDS Seth Morrison

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Moderator Grant F. Smith: I think I’ll just start off, then, by introducing our next speaker, Seth Morrison, who’s held leadership posts in various local, regional and national Jewish organizations, starting in college as a youth leader in Young Judaea. He’s currently active in Jewish Voice for Peace. He’s serving in the DC Metro Chapter Steering Committee and on the National Congressional Outreach Committee. In 2011, Seth resigned from the Washington, DC board of the Jewish National Fund in protest over Israel’s repeated evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. At this point, we’d like to hear from Seth Morrison. Thank you very much.

Seth Morrison: Good morning. How many people will be joining me on Sunday evening as we watch the next round of “Game of Thrones”? Not too many. It’s a fascinating show, and it’s really a chess game between various factions trying to take power in this mythical kingdom. I think that’s a good analogy as we look at the American Jewish community, along with Christian Zionist groups and other allies, and how they’ve become so powerful.

Grant gave us a fascinating picture, and I have to admit I’ve

learned a few things from it, even though I was actively involved in these groups. He’s shown us the financial and legal side of how our community has become quite powerful. What I’m going to do today is really the opposite, in that I’m going to focus on the social side and the community side, and talk both about my own experiences and what I’ve gone through in my transition, and also what I’ve seen and learned about our community. I guess in some ways, you could consider this competitive intelligence.

One thing I want to start with is a realization that I’ve had on some of the work I’ve been doing in the last year is that a major reason why our community is so strong on the political side and in the financial side is that in the ’30s and ’40s, we were a total failure. And if you think back, those of you who have read history, who have studied the Great Depression, who studied World War II, you know that we talk in the Jewish community a lot about the Holocaust. But in the 1930s, especially the latter part of the ’30s, it was pretty well known that the Holocaust was really bad. We didn’t know that there were mechanized death camps, but there The Israel Lobby Conference

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were a lot of stories about how serious the situation was, but at that time the U.S. had clamped down on visas.

My four grandparents all came from Eastern Europe before World War I, but those who stayed back and tried to get in later couldn’t do so. Basically, our community, even though we were thriving and doing well economically, we didn’t have political influence. Then during World War II, when we knew about the death camps, our greatest leaders went to [President Franklin] Roosevelt and said, “Bomb the rail lines, save some lives, stop people from going to the camps,” and Roosevelt said no.

We talk today about the power of our community. We talk about the fact that the presidents and Congress take direction—but understand that that came from colossal failure. That colossal failure motivated our community and the leaders at the time to sit down and say, “Okay, guys, how are we going to overcome this?”

So, taking that personally, I was born in ’51, and when I started Sunday school in my synagogue at age three, we marched around in blue shorts and little white caps playing Kibbutzniks. We were told how these wonderful, brave people were out there saving our people and creating a homeland. All of the clergy members and religious schoolteachers in my synagogue and in most of the other synagogues were Holocaust survivors. Now, it was sort of a charitable thing. These people came through utter terror. They hadn’t gone to college. They needed jobs. We found them jobs. As kids, I have to admit, we were pretty cruel. We made jokes about their accents and all of that, but the lesson also came through that these were people to be revered and refute terrible things.

We also knew that you didn’t really talk about being Jewish too much outside of the home and the synagogue. I mean there wasn’t a lot of anti-Semitism on Long Island in the mid-’50s and ’60s, but we were aware that we were different. But suddenly came June of ’67 and everything changed phenomenally with the Six-Day War. We won. We were victors. We were no longer victims. And that made a tremendous difference to our community, it took on a whole different light.

That caused me to get involved in Zionist youth work and become very active in it in high school and college, and that was of course pure indoctrination. I mean the only mention we had of the Palestinians came with the word terrorist or with the word refugees, because they voluntarily left Israel on their own because Israel was going to be driven into the sea. You have to understand that this was what I’d been hearing since I was three years old. This is not something that was new. This was our life.

This was our family. This was our history. When we had family gatherings, we talked about the cousins who made it out and the cousins who didn’t. We talked about cousins who lived in Canada because they couldn’t get into the U.S. This was a major indoctrination.

After college, I did not move to Israel. I was sort of a failure in the Zionist world. I started my career in cable television, and my second job caused me to leave Long Island and move to Cincinnati, Ohio. In a new community—I knew a few people at work— what do you do? Well, you look for the Jewish community. I found a Jewish person at work and she took me to her synagogue one day and then I went to some other synagogues. You get involved in your community.

I think it’s only a natural thing.

What happens when you do that is suddenly somebody comes over to you and says, “Hey, welcome to town. This is committee. Maybe you want to help us out,” and, “Hey, I know you don’t have a lot of money.

You’re young, and we’re glad to have you, but you’ve got to get used to giving. It’s our culture. It’s our history. And you can only give 25 bucks, give $25. We respect that.” It became an indoctrination.

I then moved on to Seattle/ Tacoma, and there I was a little more senior. I’ve been promoted. I had a new job. They said, “Will you join our young leadership?” There’s some status, and you get more involved. And then they said, “We’ve decided that we’re going to do a young leadership mission to Israel.” I’ve been to Israel with the Zionist group. I’ve been there a few times, but suddenly I was official. You’re going on a mission. They took us to the Golan Heights and we looked down at the kibbutzim who were being bombed. They took us to Gaza, and we met with this woman who told us about how she was willing to live there with her young children even though it was in danger because this was our land. This was the fulfillment of our dream.

These things all made a tremendous difference, and they make an impression on young Jews, even those like me who were not particularly religious. It’s an involvement. It’s an identity. My career took me to the Bay Area, and really by coincidence, a couple of things happened at once. A friend of mine from the youth movement, who was basically a member when I was a leader—and I had sort of stayed in touch with—became a pro-Palestinian activist. He actually went out and learned Arabic and talked about the fact that, “You know, these aren’t bad people.” Frankly, he called me and asked for some money, but told me what he was doing and the work he was doing and basi-

Everything changed phenomenally with the Six-Day War.

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cally said, “You’re not hearing the whole story.” That started a long round of changes.

Also, equally by coincidence, I met somebody who was involved in the New Israel Fund. For those of you who don’t know the New Israel Fund, it is a Jewish charity, an Israeli charity, that focuses on civil society, democracy, human rights. It supports many of the civil rights groups that are working on behalf of Palestinians. The one thing they do not do is support BDS, but they are very much progressive, very much in light of things that most of us in this room would support—but when you get into that question of what is a Zionist, they will tell you that they believe in a Jewish state.

But the biggest thing that happened to me is that I got involved in an organization called the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, also through ties from the youth group and family friends.

Arava is university-level education on the environment for Hebrew speakers, Arabic speakers, Palestinians and Jordanians, and North Americans. That became my major personal fund-raising focus for a number of years, and it took me to Israel a few times and gave me the opportunity to meet many young Palestinians who were basically saying, “I’m so concerned about the environment that I’m willing to sit and live and work with Israelis so that we can work together on the environment.”

Many stories I could tell you, but the one I think hits closest to home is that a few years ago, we had a couple of Arava alumni, one Israeli-American woman and a Palestinian man—his name was Anton—who lived in Bethlehem and had studied at the institute. They were here on a fund-raising tour, and we had a day off here in DC. I said, “Okay, what do you guys want to do? You have all of DC. I’ll be your tour guide.” They both said, “We want to go to the Smithsonian. We’ve heard about these museums.” We went first to Natural History because Anton is an ornithologist and he wanted to see that collection. Then when we finished, we had a cup of coffee and I said, “Okay, what do you want to do?” We were looking at the map of the Smithsonian, and, to be honest, I almost fell off my chair because Anton said, “I want to go to the Holocaust Museum. I’ve heard all my life about the Holocaust and how the Holocaust is the reason for Israel and how the Holocaust justifies Israel. But I never really understood it. Can we go there?”

Those of you who tried to go to the Holocaust Museum know that they’re sold out most of the time. You need tickets to get in. I sort of got my courage up, and I went up to the information desk and said, “I have a weird story for you. I’m Jewish. I don’t have tickets, but I have a Palestinian man from Bethlehem who wants to learn about the Holocaust. Can I please have some tickets?” The woman looked at me like I was nuts and she said, “Well, I have to talk to my supervisor.” But the supervisor came out and I told her the whole story, and she said, “Sure, we’re honored.” We did our tour. We came out, and we were both pretty emotional. You know what it’s like to visit that museum.

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I said, “Anton, what do you think?” And Anton said, “I never knew. I never understood what this was. I never understood how horrible it was. Thank you for taking me. This is terrible.” But then he took a deep breath, and I’m glad he trusted me enough to say this—and he has, by the way, given me permission to share this story. He said, “But how does that justify what I go through at the checkpoints?” Brilliant. And I think that’s a very important learning, that we have to separate these things.

I went through that. I became a J Street activist. I got involved in JNF because of Arava, because Arava gets its funding from JNF and it was a way to bring more money in. Then I found out that the JNF was stealing homes from Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and I’d been told that wasn’t happening when I got involved, so I resigned there. But I stayed in J Street for a couple of more years, but then I started finding that J Street, while they’re saying all these wonderful things, is not getting anything done and is not willing to use the power that they had gained to really make change. That as long as they were unwilling to challenge aid, as long as they were unwilling to say veto these U.N. resolutions, I realized that J Street just wasn’t going to work. And that’s when I resigned and joined Jewish Voice for Peace.

It’s helped me over the last couple of years to understand a lot more about these organizations, about the structure. And while still respecting the Zionist idea, because that is part of my heritage and culture, I also have realized that the current situation is untenable. I don’t know how we’re going to solve this. One state, two states, there’s a lot of healthy debate, but it’s clear that strong, aggressive action is going to be required to make change. That’s what I think groups like JVP and others like most of you are willing to do.

Let me take this discussion back to the broad level and pick up where Grant left off. What I want to talk about is the group that really is responsible for the strength of the Jewish community.

Most of you would probably say that that’s AIPAC, but I will respectfully say that that’s wrong.

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The group that is really in charge that you don’t hear about very often is the Conference of Presidents of Major [American] Jewish Organizations. If you look at these slides, you’ll see on these slides 53 organizations that are every large Jewish group, with the exception of J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace. All of the synagogue groups, all of the fund-raising groups, all of the political groups, all of the influencing organizations, 53 people in one room control those groups.

How many people know who the board of AIPAC is? I have to admit, Grant told me this one when we were getting ready for this presentation. I still didn’t know it, but I didn’t realize it as directly. The Conference of Presidents, these 53 people, are the board of AIPAC. It is in that body that these decisions are made and that all of this confluence comes together. The synagogues get their marching orders, the universities get their marching orders, the charities get their marching orders, from those 53 people.

And every once in a while, you’ll meet a liberal Zionist, like I was, and he’ll say, “We stood up and we argued for the Palestinians.” And you know what happens? They’re outvoted, 50 to 3, and they stand up and they say, “I argued for the Palestinians.” And they may feel good, and they go to all these fancy meetings, but the reality is that they’re ignored.

Let me just give you two conclusions that I hope you’ll keep with you throughout the day and throughout your work. One is that we have to understand who our opponents are, and we have to use the same skills. We have to find a way to unify our groups, whether it be church groups or peace groups or mosques, and organize ourselves as strongly as our opponents. Because they are strong, and they put together a wonderful organization that somebody could do a case study on. We must learn from them and use that.

The second thing is about the Palestinian initiative against what is called normalization. It’s a very valid issue, that says that Palestinians should not participate in activities that normalize the occupation or show them on the same level as Israelis because, clearly, they’re not. And I support that initiative, but I will also say that I would not be here today if I hadn’t met Anton and so many other Palestinians willing to educate me about their life story and about their history and about why there’s another side. Especially, as we look at American Jewish communities, we have to talk to them. We have to reach out to them, and it’s not easy, and you’ll hear things you don’t like. But especially we have to bring Palestinians to them and say why they’re mistreated and how they’re mistreated and share their stories so that we can all learn from each other.

Thank you. ■

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Jeffrey Blankfort: The ADL: Covert Action, Censure, and Courting Law Enforcement

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The ADL: Covert Action, Censure, and Courting Law Enforcement Jeffrey Blankfort

PHOTO BILL HUGHES

Moderator Grant F. Smith: Jeffrey Blankfort is a photojournalist and radio host. It was his first trip to Lebanon and Jordan in 1970 to take photos for a book on the Palestinian struggle that led to his involvement in their cause. He became a founding member of the November 29th Committee on Palestine and a cofounder of the Labor Committee on the Middle East. Blankfort currently hosts a twice-monthly program on international affairs for KZYX, the public radio station for Mendocino County in Northern California. Please welcome Jeff Blankfort.

Jeffrey Blankfort: First of all, I would like to welcome you to the most important Israeli-occupied territory: Washington. In case you had any confusion about that. And that will be proven by the fact that there will be no coverage of this event in the national media, as happened last year, although C-SPAN did cover the event last year…not this year.

The Anti-Defamation League, which I’m going to talk about today, was formed by B’nai B’rith, the world’s oldest Jewish organization, 101 years ago last October. It was formed “to stop... the defamation of the Jewish people... to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.”

By 1937, however, it was already in the spying business, providing information to the federal government about individuals and groups that it considered to be subversive.

One of them was the first House Committee on Un-American Activities, run by Martin Dies, whose antipathy to Jews was well known. Among his first targets was the National Lawyers Guild, the majority of whose members happened to be Jews.

A decade later, in 1947, it joined the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in the Hollywood “witch hunts,” acting as liaison for Jewish witnesses who wished to inform on their friends and offering information on those who refused to do so.

In October that year, hearings before the House Committee on

Executive Department Expenditures revealed that the Civil Service Commission, without congressional authorization, was collecting information on individuals who had not applied for jobs in the civil service—the alleged subversives. And they were providing this information not just to the civil service administration, but to the FBI and HUAC. This appalled the committee chair, Michigan Democrat Clare Hoffman.

When asked to define the groups that had provided the Civil Service the information, Hoffman said, “I will tell you that they are smear artists.” He was mainly referring to the ADL, which had provided information to the committee on up to 7,000 individuals.

Mind you, this was a year before Israel came into being, and reflected more the nature of the ADL than its commitment to Zionism. But this would change.

With anti-Jewish discrimination no longer a problem, protecting and propagandizing for the new state of Israel and censuring its critics and intimidating potential critics came to dominate ADL’s agenda, and has since. Long before Abe Foxman became the national director, its leadership had already invented the “new antiSemitism” equating criticism of Israel with disliking Jews.

In 1971, True magazine interviewed three top officials of the ADL who boasted of its uses of undercover agents. And the interviewer said, “ADL must have a pretty extensive spy network to do all that.”

Well, it did.

It became evident in 1993, when an unprecedented police raid on ADL’s San Francisco headquarters revealed that its “Number One investigator” Roy Bullock—that’s how ADL chief spy [the late Irwin Suall] described him—had taken part in the ADL’s nationwide spying organization.

The majority of the information in his files had been illegally obtained, according to the police, and violations committed by the ADL were so great that the district attorney said there were possibly 48 felonies that they would be charged with.

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At the time of the raid Bullock was being paid as a “cutout” unofficially for 30 years by a Beverly Hills attorney who was an ADL official, so it would not appear on its records, the ADL’s records. At first ADL denied to even senior staff members that Bullock was one of theirs.

A memo sent to ADL’s regional directors simply referred to “information [that] was found in the possession of an individual who is alleged to have a relationship with the ADL.” The memo also attacked reports “falsely implying that ADL worked covertly with Tom Gerard to monitor Arab Americans.”

That was a reference to police inspector Tom Gerard of the San Francisco police, whose earlier arrest for unlawfully possessing thousands of computerized files on Arab Americans had sparked the story in the first place.

Well, proof of this was a confidential memo of a meeting in the ADL office with Gerard about a Palestinian Bay Area activist, and the information was then sent to Irwin Suall, the chief spymaster of the ADL in New York. Bullock, who worked with Gerard, was being paid $25,000 annually through this cutout, as I mentioned, and his job was to infiltrate and spy on Arab-American organizations and those he referred to in his files as “anti-democratic” organizations and individuals. Some, like neo-Nazis, militia groups and skinheads, did come under that category, but the majority didn’t fit that category.

According to more than 700 documents released by the district attorney, Bullock’s files contained information on 77 Arab and Palestinian organizations and 647 groups that Bullock labeled “pinko” and anti-apartheid groups. What Bullock labeled “pinko” were organizations from every sector of the progressive social, legal and political spectrum, from the NAACP to the Asian Law Caucus, United Farm Workers, and so on. Any group that might eventually take a position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he kept files on.

The names of more than 12,000 people on whom he kept files were never released.

The decision to make what he had public, effectively ended the district attorney’s political career. But then he caved in to pressure from the Jewish establishment and didn’t file any charges against anybody. It didn’t help him, however.

A separate section of Bullock’s files were devoted to groups opposing South African apartheid, including the African National Congress, which the ADL vehemently opposed. His surveillance of anti-apartheid activists reflected ADL’s efforts to keep information about Israeli-South African ties from going public.

Since, as Bullock acknowledged, he was already collecting this material for the ADL, when he went to work for South African intelligence officially, and being paid by South African intelligence, he was already doing that work. He didn’t have to do any more work.

His career began to unravel when he infiltrated the Labor Committee on the Middle East, which Bay Area labor and anti-apartheid activist Steve Zeltzer and I founded in 1987. Bullock attended the first two meetings at Zeltzer’s house, and he had infiltrated an antiapartheid group that was supporting an imprisoned South African labor activist. That’s the way Steve invited him to come to the first meeting. And I had met him because he had infiltrated the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where, because of his beefy appearance, he worked as “security” at their events.

Shortly thereafter, I received in the mail a page from the journal of the Institute for Historical Review, which claimed that Bullock, who had attended its conferences, had been working for the ADL, spying for it for 25 years. While no fan of that group, I suspected that what it said of Bullock was true.

Steve and I met with him, showed him the article and asked for his response. He denied working for the ADL, but did say he attended the conferences of the Institute for Historical Review, and he had done so, he said, in order to recruit members for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee—which is, of course, the last place the ADC would want to recruit members—but the ADL would want them to because they could blame and smear the ADC by saying they were pro-Nazi or Holocaust deniers and so on.

Having made some inquiries of my own ahead of our meeting, I asked Bullock to explain why he managed to turn up at so many Palestinian conferences around the country. Well, he was an art dealer, he explained, and by coincidence, his trips to buy art were coincidentally at the same time Palestinians were holding conferences around the country. Well, to back that up, and this was important, he provided references to two art galleries that he said would back him up as being an art dealer.

Well, Steve and I realized that this guy was a fraud, and was actually a spy, and we didn’t bother to checking the references. But I kept those references, and so when the Gerard story broke in the paper, I thought that there was a connection between Bullock and Gerard.

And so I called Dennis Opatrny, who was the [San Francisco] Examiner reporter writing about the story, and said to him, “Does

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Jeffrey Blankfort: The ADL: Covert Action, Censure, and Courting Law Enforcement

the name Bullock mean anything to you?” And he said, “Boy, does it!” At that point it was only a last name in Gerard’s files. And so I gave him the name of the art galleries, and he called the art galleries, and then the story broke. ABC came out and photographed Bullock on the streets of San Francisco and it became the big story in local newspapers, and I was attacked in Jewish newspapers from the Jerusalem Post, Jewish [Daily] Forward, Washington Jewish Week, for having done that, for having exposed their spy.

By a twist of fate, ABC wanted to speak to someone who had been spied on by Bullock, and so the Assistant District Attorney John Dwyer gave them Steve’s file, and in Steve’s file was my name. So Steve called to let me know that I was in his file. I called Dwyer, it was about 2:00 in the afternoon, and I said, “Can I get my file?” He said, “Sure, come over and get it.” I wasn’t that far from the Hall of Justice, so I went over to get it.

And if I hadn’t done that, I never would have seen the file.

Because that night, thanks to an ADL request, the files were closed and have been closed ever since. That enabled us to have a case.

The information in mine was a mixed bag, much of it sloppy and most of it wrong, such as my marrying a woman in 1963 who I had never heard of. It also contained my social security number, which the ADL had no business legally having. And the information had clearly come from the FBI, with whom the ADL has had a long working relationship.

Attorney and former Congressman Pete McCloskey—former congressman, himself a target of the ADL—he believed we should

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file a class action suit against the league and that he would do it, pro bono. If it were not for McCloskey we would not have had a case, because other lawyers would never have taken this case, because it would damage their political career.

To qualify as a plaintiff, one had needed to either support Palestinian or oppose Israeli policies, or oppose apartheid in South Africa. Steve and I had done both.

Initially, there were 19 individuals in the case. Sixteen dropped out, however, when they were afraid that if we lost they would have to pay court costs. That left me, Steve and Anne Poirier, an anti-apartheid activist, in the case. McCloskey single-handedly faced down a brace of the ADL attorneys from the highest paid and the largest law firm in San Francisco at the time.

We contended that the ADL had violated a California right to privacy that was designed to prevent institutions, like the ADL, from having [private] information and distributing it to other sources. And that is what the court would determine: that the ADL had taken our information, and given it to Israel and South Africa.

In 2002, after almost 10 years in the courts, the ADL threw in the towel.

On the Friday before the Monday when the court had determined we should go to trial, the ADL offered a monetary settlement for which we would not have to sign a confidentiality agreement, which would have prohibited me from later speaking about the case as I am doing now. And that’s the reason the case went so long. We would not sign that agreement.

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PANEL 1: What Is the Israel Lobby and How Does It Work?

What didn’t the ADL want us to talk about?

Well, one thing, Bullock was being paid by South African intelligence for spying on black South African exiles, and that he had followed and reported on the travels of Chris Hani, a young black South African leader who was expected to become president one day, after Nelson Mandela, and who was later assassinated.

It didn’t want the public to know that in Bullock’s files was a floor plan and a key to the office of Alex Odeh, who was a leader of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Orange County, whom Bullock had befriended. And that was in his files, and Bullock was never asked about how he had these files, and the key, and the floor plan of Odeh’s office in his files. [Odeh was murdered by a terrorist bomb upon entering his office in 1985.] ADL also wanted to bury the fact that it was operating a national spying network with seven spies around the country in different—at least seven spies like Bullock—working in different Arab-American communities, reporting information to the ADL. A telling moment came when Pete brought Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent, down to Redwood City for a deposition.

And the ADL’s lawyers asked him to give them the information that he had taken with him when he quit Mossad and left Israel and used it for his book [By Way of Deception]. So here’s the ADL’s lawyers asking the former Mossad agent for his files from Mossad. You want a connection between ADL and Mossad? It’s right there.

Of course, it was logical, but back in 1961 there was a letter from the head of the ADL, Ben Epstein, which bragged about how the ADL provided information to the government of Israel and the government of the United States. It bragged about how [when Saul] Joftes, who was head of the B’nai B’rith, complained, Joftes was fired. He said the ADL shouldn’t be doing that, said Joftes, and so Joftes lost his job.

The police investigation of the ADL in San Francisco was unusual because the ADL had collaborated with police all around the county, and the San Francisco Police, when they went to Los Angeles, which was heavily infiltrated by the ADL, the LA Police Department, the LAPD, would not cooperate with the San Francisco Police in their investigation.

The [Los Angeles] Police behavior was not atypical. For years, the ADL has been currying the favors of police chiefs and law enforcement officials across the country, sending them on allexpense-paid trips to Israel—Gerard had been on one of those trips. According to the ADL’s 2013 990 tax filing, 890 law enforcement personnel had been through its “advanced training school on extremist and terrorist threats,” and more than 85,000 had undergone training in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Museum here.

How that was expected to benefit the Americans, I don’t know.

In one of its publications, designed for law enforcement officials, the ADL boasts that: “Through strategic cooperation with the FBI, Israeli police and others, we facilitate the exchange of information and best practices regarding extremist threats. Law enforcement officials at the federal, state, and local levels turn to ADL repeatedly for assistance and value our expertise. We exchange with law enforcement personnel across the country on a daily basis, monitoring individual extremists and extremist groups.”

It’s a scary scenario, but not without its ardent supporters, such as FBI Director James Comey. On April 28, a year ago, addressing the ADL’s national conference, Comey thanked the organization for having trained more than 12,000 law enforcement personnel the previous year, and since 2010, he said, FBI employees have participated in more than 105 training sessions sponsored by the ADL on extremism and hate crimes, in 17 states and here in Washington, DC. “Your leadership,” he said of the ADL, “in tracking and exposing domestic and international terrorist threats is invaluable…And the training you voluntarily provide—at conferences, in classrooms, and at the community level—is eyeopening and insightful.”

“If this sounds a bit like a love letter to the ADL,” he said, “it is, and rightly so.”

Reality check: shortly after Comey’s talk, Grant Smith here, under the Freedom of Information Act, requested copies of the training materials used in ADL’s sessions with the FBI. According to the Justice Department, they couldn’t find any.

Second reality check, and closing up here, in November 1983 Leonard Zakim, executive director of the ADL’s New England office in Boston, sent campus Jewish leaders “a booklet containing background information on pro-Arab sympathizers who are active on college campuses,” telling them that if “you need more information on these individual groups or any others, please call us.”

He encouraged them to pass knowledge on that they may have “on other individuals and groups on to us so we can have a more complete and useful listing.”

In a postscript he cautioned that “this booklet should be considered confidential” because “it easily could be misconstrued.” Among the names included were Prof. Edward Said and Sen. James Abourezk. The booklet’s existence was not made public until January 1985, when the Middle East Studies Association was preparing to pass a resolution asking the ADL to disown the document.

When questioned about it by The New York Times, Zakim said the document had been careless and that he would not have written

“”

What didn’t the ADL want us to talk about?

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

the cover letter if he had considered the matter thoroughly. Given it had been distributed more than a year before that, it was obvious that the only thing Zakim regretted was that he had been caught.

His reputation survived that.

In 2002, Boston had a new bridge named the Leonard P. Zakim

Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, after Zakim and the American colonists who fought the British at Bunker Hill. I very much doubt that if those colonists were around today, that they would like to be linked with the ADL. Thank you very much. ■

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Moderator Grant F. Smith: Our next panel should be assembling over on the side. Again, if we could have Jeff Blankfort’s questions brought up to him directly. We’re going to start the next panel right on time so we’ve got about five minutes for questions. You can always ask us later as well.

I’ve got a few questions here. Question number one: Can’t Arab allies of the U.S. use the legal approach of lobbying to influence U.S. Congress? The answer is no. The 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act is selectively enforced. If you’re Pakistani, you will be prosecuted if you attempt to do this. It is only one country that really has a total exemption to this.

Question number two: How many A-bombs does Israel have? I don’t know. Jimmy Carter, after he left office, speculated it was 100 or 150, something like that.

Jeff Blankfort: It’s about 300.

Grant F. Smith: Three hundred, okay. Thank you.

Jeff Blankfort: I saw it this morning.

Grant F. Smith: I quoted documents proving that Israel has nuclear weapons laboratories equivalent to Los Alamos. Does that mean that it not only has a fission bomb but also a fusion bomb?

The report, again you can find it online, “Critical Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations.” It states unequivocally that in 1987, they were developing the codes they needed to build hydrogen bombs. Look at the report, but it’s pretty unequivocal. I’ll leave it to Seth. He’s going to go through his questions.

Seth Morrison: I’ll try to go through these quickly because there’s a lot here. Could or should you delegitimize the Israel Lobby without delegitimizing Israel itself? Do you think Israel is sustainable?

In all honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that we tend to focus on the Israel-South Africa analogy. There is a problem with that analogy in that in South Africa, the whites were 10 percent and the blacks were 90 percent. In Israel, roughly 50 percent of the people are Jewish. We have a horrible situation with competition for the land, and we have to find a way to be fair to all of them and hopefully better minds than mine can do that.

Does AIPAC mentor or develop people in Washington at the senior level? I’d say it’s the wrong question because what AIPAC

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does is it starts at the beginning. In local communities, AIPAC is politically neutral. They recruit both Democrats and Republicans and go to see everybody. If you run for city council or state legislator, somebody is going to come over to you and say, “Hi, I’m a Democrat. If you’re a Democrat, then I’m a Democrat. I’m from AIPAC. We just wanted to say hi and by the way, here’s my check.” It’s somebody who is probably going to give him a check anyway, but he’s doing it through AIPAC so that he gets the influence. By the time they get to DC, they’re already purchased.

This is an interesting one: Talk about the funding of the Conference of Presidents. Again, it’s a non-issue. These are the heads of the groups that we just heard raised millions. The Conference of Presidents is unbelievably small. It has one executive and I think if I read correctly, it’s like five or six staff. They’re a decision-making body, not an operational body, so funding for them is not an issue.

Jeffrey Blankfort: Malcolm Hoenlein, who is the long-time executive director of the Conference of Presidents, bragged back in 1995 when Clinton was president as having been the architect helping to form the first Counterterrorism and Death Penalty Act. We should add that the number of possible death penalties under the federal law, but also really responsible for making it almost impossible for Arab Americans to donate money to Palestinian organizations without the possibility of being arrested for collaborating with a terrorist organization. They are very instrumental, and they have access to the offices of every member of Congress.

One other thing I should say about AIPAC that we’ll hear about later is they have their meetings and dinners and luncheons all over the country, and they invite members of all the local officials— mayors, city councilmen, supervisors, police chiefs —anyone who is a potential candidate for Congress. When they leave, then the local federations, Jewish organization, then send those officials on allexpense-paid trips to Israel, so by the time when they come back, they realize that these organizations are powerful politically—and very ambitious politicians, they know where the bread is buttered, and so they’re in Israel’s pocket even before they run for Congress.

Moderator Grant F. Smith: Thank you very much. Next panel, please. ■ The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 2: Are Critical Voices Silenced?

Are Critical Voices Silenced?

Askia Muhammad

G

Moderator

PANEL 2

Introduction by Moderator Askia Muhammad reetings. While we’re getting our nametags straight and everyone is getting seated, I have been asked to ask everyone not to stream. We’re streaming this online for everyone. And so if you have your iPhone or Android, whatever, don’t bother to stream. As the modern phenomena is, you look at the picture from upstairs and everybody is holding a camera, so please don’t stream.

I’m Askia Muhammad. I’m the news director of WPFW-FM. That’s the Pacifica station here in Washington. I write a column for the Washington Informer newspaper here. I’m a senior editor of the Final Call newspaper.

I’d like to, as I introduce this distinguished panel, remind you of one of the things I considered so important about this event. The event has collected what I would say are unimpeachable witnesses to something that is an unspoken reality, an unspoken truth. Just bear that in mind: The witnesses are unimpeachable.

There are a couple of things I’d like to commend to your attention. Yesterday, April 9th, was the 150th anniversary of the surrender of the treasonist rebel leader Gen. Robert E. Lee. The army of Northern Virginia surrendered unconditionally to the United States Army led by Ulysses Grant. I’d say treasonous and traitorous because it was 110 years after General Lee’s death before his citizenship in the United States of America, the US of A, was restored.

They were in rebellion. They formed an armed uprising against the United States of America, which I think constitutes treason and traitor behavior. I mentioned that because after this surrender unconditionally, it ushered in 100 years of American apartheid, which ended ostensibly with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the 1960s civil rights movement.

I used the word “apartheid” because a clone—and it was just referred to the United States of America, the US of A, the U of SA—South Africa—really perfected the apartheid regime and brought it into existence. It seemed even up until the presidency of Ronald Reagan that it might endure forever. But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” South African apartheid was dismantled.

Today, former President Jimmy Carter says what no sitting president can ever say and will say in the cover of his book; the title of his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

When this question is raised, “Why are you calling this apartheid?” Well, in some ways, it is an apartheid state, although the population is 50/50. If there were a one-state solution, boy, one person one vote, you’d have a questionable outcome.

Nevertheless, the arc of the moral universe is long. It bends toward justice. This event today is a witness of that, because I think I heard Grant Smith say this similar event was organized a few months ago, and about one-fourth of participants were here. So this is growing. The BDS Movement is growing, and so prepare to understand that you are not alone.

The guests I’m going to introduce—and I guess we’ll have them speak in alphabetical order—again, unimpeachable.

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Prof. richard Falk: Weakening and Discrediting the U.N.: the Work of Pro-israel NGos

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Weakening and Discrediting the U.N.: The Work of Pro-Israel NGOs Prof. Richard Falk

Photo Phil Portlock

Moderator Askia Muhammad: Please allow me to present for his remarks Richard Anderson Falk. Prof. Richard Falk is the author of 20 books and the editor or co-editor of another 20 volumes, including Achieving Human Rights, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East with Howard Friel, and The Costs of War: International Law, the U.N., and World Order after Iraq. From 2008 to 2014 Falk served as U.N. Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”

Richard Falk: Let me first say that I’m honored and happy to be part of this important event and thank the conveners for bringing us together. It reveals the two sides of the present reality that should be both encouraging and disturbing. The one side being that there are growing voices that seek justice and peace for both peoples, and this kind of gathering, I think, is an affirmation of that. But it’s also true, as Jeff Blankfort reminded us, that there is a dreadful asymmetry in the way in which the public is informed about these realities. The media indulges in a kind of feasting whenever they get the opportunity to celebrate pro-Israeli happenings, and they practice the opposite in relation to any kind of balanced inquiry into the realities of the conflict.

And we must keep both of those realities in mind if we are to understand the situation correctly.

There are no better texts for assessing the damage done to the role and reputation of the United Nations by the Israeli Lobby than Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent statements about efforts within the U.N. by the U.S. to protect Israel from the fulfillment of its responsibilities under international law and in relation to the U.N. Despite the recent tensions arising over [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, Kerry boasted almost at the same time on ABC-TV news: “We have intervened on Israel’s behalf in the last two years, more than several hundred—a couple of hundred times in over 75 different fora in order

to protect Israel.” [“This Week,” Feb. 28, 2015] And then, when addressing the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Kerry included a statement that could have been drafted by AIPAC or Israel’s ambassador at the U.N. when he said: “It must be said that the Human Rights Council’s obsession with Israel actually risks undermining the credibility of the entire organization.” And further, “we will oppose any effort by any group or participant in the U.N. system to arbitrarily and regularly delegitimize or isolate Israel, not just in the Human Rights Council but wherever it occurs.” [Remarks, Palais des Nations, Geneva, March 2, 2015] What is striking about such statements by our highest ranking government officials dealing with foreign policy is the disconnect between this unconditional support and Israel’s record of disregard for its obligations under international law and with respect to the authority of the United Nations. When speaking at the March AIPAC meetings, Sen. Lindsey Graham went even further when he told the audience that when serving as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, “I’m gonna put the U.N. on notice” that I will go after the U.N. funding if the organization takes any steps to “marginalize” Israel.

During my six years as U.N. Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine I had the opportunity to observe the manner in which international and national so-called NGOs give priority to discrediting those who offer any critical assessment of Israel’s conduct.

These are “so-called” NGOs because they are so closely aligned with the governmental priorities and viewpoints of Israel that they should be really known as “quasi-governmental organizations.”

And I think of U.N. Watch and others in that category.

There are really two ways that this effort to devalue and discredit the U.N. and its activities takes place. One is to attack individuals and the other is to attack the organization itself. Most consistently, a reliance on defamatory attacks on the critics as biased and even anti-Semitic whenever someone describing Israeli violations of The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 2: Are Critical Voices Silenced?

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tion. And if you repeat, as Joseph Goebbels understood very well, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes a kind of publicly accepted truth. And that’s where the, I think, very destructive effect of this kind of tactics occurs.

Mentioning just one incident that is illustrative of a much broader pattern, the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon denounced me as biased, even using the word despicable, with reference to opinions that had nothing to do with my role as Special Rapporteur but referred to distortions of what I had said about the 9/11 attacks and about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. After the first of these (L-r) Thomas Rambeau, Ryan Dawson, Prof. Richard Falk and Hannah McCoy. attacks I tried to find out why the secretary-general would launch such an attack on someone within the international law or sympathetically reporting on Palestinian grievorganization, and I was told by his aide de camp that they didn’t, ances. Coupled with this kind of personal attack is an avoidance of as he put it, do due diligence, which means they didn’t read what substantive aspects as to whether the criticisms or grievances are it was I supposedly said. And besides, they were under pressure well-founded from the perspective of international law and human from the U.S. Congress to show that they were not anti-Israeli. It rights law. In other words, these defamatory attacks are disassowas a time when Ban Ki-moon was running for a second term as ciated from whether their substance is grounded in fact and reasecretary-general. So one sees the insidious way in which these sonable interpretations of relevant law. Even those defamatory political maneuvers play out. And it’s sort of reminiscent of the attacks, at least in my case, focused on distorted presentations of Soviet system, where the leadership reaches out to some lowly my views on a variety of issues that were made in settings other individual like myself in order to demonstrate a kind of larger politthan the U.N. and did not pertain to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. ical reality.

The intended effect was to shift attention from the message conWhat I am trying to explain by these references to my experitaining these issues to the messenger. In other words, instead of ence is the degree to which these quasi-NGOs stir up trouble for focusing on the message, the hope was to generate a controversy those seeking to document allegations concerning Israel’s violaabout a disreputable messenger. With incredible persistence, U.N. tion, and actually weaken the way in which the organization can Watch, in particular, circulated their defamatory attacks to promifunction on behalf of the international community and in promoting nent international personalities, including high-ranking civil serwhat I think one would hope would be the global interests, rather vants in the U.N. itself, such as the U.N. secretary-general, the than merely succumbing to the national interests of the most powhigh commissioner for human rights, and a variety of ambaserful members of the organization. One of the most disturbing feasadors of countries friendly to Israel. tures of this is the degree to which the U.S. ambassadors at the What was particularly disturbing to me was the extent to which U.N. swallow what U.N. Watch and NGO Monitor, both kind of these defamatory attacks were treated without examination as quasi-governmental organizations, what they feed them. And, credible by supposedly responsible officials here in Washington again in my case, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, both of and New York, who didn’t even bother to check with me or with whom know better, just routinely repeated the kind of denunciathe sources that were being relied upon, and led to the endorsetions and defamations that were associated with these attacks. ment of such defamation in ways damaging to my reputation but, The second approach used on behalf of Israel to weaken and more significantly, diverting attention from the substance of Israeli discredit the U.N. involves trying to both manipulate the organizauncontestable violations of fundamental international law and tion and to undermine it at the same time. It’s a very sophisticated human rights law. And that’s what I call the politics of deflection. kind of relationship to the U.N. that Israel has. It both pretends to Instead of talking about the real issues that should be discussed be victimized by the organization and yet, because of its relationwithin the U.N., the effort is to get people to talk about whether a ship to the U.S. and its clever use of these kinds of tactics, it intimparticular person is an anti-Semite or is in some way biased. It idates the organization more than any other government, however doesn’t rest on any facts. It rests on the repetition of the defamaWashington Report on Middle East Affairs–Special Supplement

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Prof. Richard Falk: Weakening and Discrediting the U.N.: The Work of Pro-Israel NGOs

large or small. It’s a kind of a tour de force of a negative variety that it is able, despite being so uncooperative, to impose its views.

Rather than being biased, the U.N. leans over backward in every particular context to make sure that Israel’s best arguments are made fully available and given as much attention as possible. In other words, the reality is just the opposite of the perception in this country. If anything, the organization could be criticized as being indifferent to the Palestinian reality and biased toward not offending Israel. It’s quite an amazing manipulation of the reality, at least as I experienced and understood it.

There was a recent speech by Israeli Ambassador [to the U.S.] Ron Dermer that spoke of the tide of hatred aimed at Israel within the U.N. That kind of language is used to influence the atmosphere here in Washington and Congress. It’s a sad commentary on the state of our democracy that so many of our elected representatives swallow this central lie about the U.N., an organization the world desperately needs to be strong and effective, because of these kinds of defamatory tactics. Rather than the U.N. reflecting the supposed hostility of repressive regimes to Israel, the U.N. has increasingly been neutralized in any effort to produce a sustainable peace that is just for both peoples.

One forgets that it is the U.N. that failed the Palestinian people when the British gave up their colonial mandate and dumped the future of Palestine into the hands of the U.N. It’s unlike any other

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place in the world, as far as U.N. responsibility is concerned. And so, again, the criticism that Kerry made and others that the U.N. devotes disproportionate attention to the Israel/Palestine conflict is really the reverse of what it should be doing. That is, for over 65 years it’s failed to realize the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people that every other major people in the world has enjoyed and achieved. We have reached a time when we should expect and demand of not only the U.S. government but of the international community that it fulfils this long-neglected responsibility, and not to overlook the present realities of both peoples and the mistakes of the past, but to create some kind of future that is viable for both peoples.

My time is rapidly elapsing, more rapidly than my text, unfortunately. But let me just say the following…that Palestine may be winning the legitimacy war being waged throughout the world and at the United Nations to obtain popular support for the Palestinian cause with the peoples of the world, but it is continuing to lose the geopolitical war that is being waged within the organization, and it’s very important to keep these two wars in mind. The legitimacy war is a war waged by people to achieve rights and justice. The geopolitical war is being waged by powerful governmental forces linked to powerful economic forces that seek to sustain unjust structures of authority and power. Let me stop there and thank you for your patience. ■

Silencing Voices That Question Israeli Actions Dr. Alice Rothchild

Moderator Askia Muhammad: Our next speaker is a Bostonbased physician and author and filmmaker and an activist. Dr. Falk mentioned the defamatory tactics. One defamatory tactic with which we’re all familiar is labeling someone an anti-Semite.

Another, which has not been used as often as it was maybe 20 years ago, is to label someone a self-hating Jew. Dr. Alice Rothchild is involved in the activities for human rights and social justice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She’s an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace, American Jews for a Just Peace, the Workmen’s Circle Middle East Working Group. She has been organizing health and human rights delegations to Israel, to the West Bank and Gaza since 2003. Please welcome Dr. Alice Rothchild.

Alice Rothchild: Thank you so much. I just got back from Gaza three days ago, if I’m a little verklempt, as we say. First of

all, I want to talk about what silencing looks like. It kind of overlaps with active muzzling, with the strict framing of the dominant paradigm. It involves a widespread systematic intolerance of alternative framing. Silencing challenges free speech, rights of protests. It’s all about power, about fear, and about the broad cultural and political assumptions in the world that we live in.

So I’m going to first speak from my personal experiences as a self-hating Jew, as you mentioned. In 2004, I had come back from the region and I wanted to do grand rounds. I was invited to Cambridge Hospital to speak on the impact of war and occupation on civilians. Before my presentation, one of my colleagues came and leafleted the auditorium with these horrific pictures of Jews who’d been blown up by suicide bombers. After my presentation, he got up and harangued me for 10 minutes, accusing The Israel Lobby Conference

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me of lack of compassion for Jews.

I wanted to do, you know, a similar kind of discussion about health care and occupation in my own hospital. I was told by my department chief that I was, quote, a danger to the Jewish people. It took five years and his leaving, and I kept trying to do my talk. Finally, they said yes. My talk was announced.

They received a hundred emails protesting my giving these grand rounds. I had to take the word “occupation” outside of the title of my talk. And I was told to stay away from politics.

Fast forwarding the last year and a half, I’ve been doing a lot of book touring with my two books and my film and doing a lot of presentations. I’ve been bumping up against a lot of muzzling. In the academic setting, I was at American University. I was talking with students who found that if they focused on human rights and opposition to occupation, supporting BDS, etc., they found themselves marginalized and accused of bias. They described the campus that was polarized, with no conversation between the right and the left. Two professors had been included in the list of professors who are dangerous to Israel. One untenured faculty member talked about being warned to limit his critical comments about Israel because it would endanger his future career.

At John Carroll University, at a political science class called “Peacemaking in the Palestine-Israel Conflict,” there were complaints from the local Hillel stating that Jewish students on campus did not, quote, feel safe having me on campus. I get that a lot, that I make students feel unsafe. They actually had a major meeting of the faculty to determine whether I could be allowed on campus, which I was. The most disturbing part of that little event was at the end, the Israeli shaliach, which is an ambassador that the Israeli government sends out to schools and temples and things like that to, you know, do his Israel messaging, and she basically came up to me in front of all the people and started screaming at me, attacking me as a liar, doing a great disservice to the Jewish people, and just being a general bully, which was kind of an interesting experience.

At the University of Maryland, at an Arab media class, one Jewish student told the professor after I spoke that he was very unhappy with my presentation. He was disappointed in the professor. He accused me of hate speech. He said he felt offended as a member of Hillel.

At the University of Virginia at a book club, I was doing a book reading. Several alumni complained and took it all the way to the president of the university that I should not be allowed to read from my book, and then threatened to withhold funds since I was allowed. When I’ve been in more religious institutions, there’s a church in our DC suburbs that shares a building with a temple. They’ve had a long positive relationship. The rabbi told the minister there that if he showed my film that he would sever their relationship.

There was a church in Vermont with a very wonderful pastor who does a lot of work with a progressive-except-Palestine rabbi who really pushed him hard when he invited me to the church. I saw the e-mails. The tone of the e-mails were, I’m profoundly disappointed in you. We’ve worked together on all these issues. I thought I could trust you. And now, you are showing this antiSemitic, one-sided film from this known self-hating Jew. When I tried to speak in temples, that’s like getting up against the wall of McCarthyism. I’ve had a couple of little successes.

There was a Reformed temple in Ithaca which I found that whenever they have announcements about speakers like me, the person who does the newsletter puts a little disclaimer saying, “This does not represent the opinions of the temple.” I also found this, as I made my rounds of the few temples that would let me in, is that their maps of Israel are all the Greater Israel, including all the occupied territories. So that was sort of fascinating to find out.

I was invited to an Orthodox synagogue in DC by an Orthodox human rights lawyer who’s also a Hebrew school teacher there.

We set up the film, and the rabbi cancelled it. At the Greater Jewish community—I was in Sacramento—there’s a Jewish Federation newspaper called Jewish Voice. For two times in a row, they refused to publish an announcement that I’m in town— once doing a book reading, once showing my film—because they say that I am anti-Israel.

In the Jewish community, in a public library in Ohio, I had this totally conflicted, agonized audience. They were completely unaware of the many millions of dollars that are being spent on Israeli hasbara and the aggressive control of Israel messaging.

One woman got up and she said, “We could have this open conversation anywhere in the United States. But in Arab countries, we would be censored, arrested, and sold into sex slavery.” I pointed out that, actually, I cannot have this conversation anywhere in the

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Dr. Alice Rothchild: Silencing Voices That Question Israeli Actions

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United States. In fact, I can’t have this conversation in most temples, Hillels, and Jewish community centers.

She then pointed out that the poster for my talk was very offensive because it had the word “conflict” in it and a picture of the separation wall. She said, “It says what side you’re on.” The most disturbing point in this very interesting public library came at the end, when a little lady comes up to the poor woman who’s selling my books and announced in a very loud voice that my book should be burned. At which point, a gentleman standing behind her said, “That’s what they did in Nazi Germany.”

Last February, I was leaving New York City. I saw this huge billboard—I don’t know if you’ve seen it—that says, “New York Times against Israel, all rant, all slant. Stop the bias.” This is sponsored by the wonderfully well-funded and ironically misnamed Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

So silencing can be both active and it also comes from how we frame the issues and the language, and what are the assumptions behind it. So going back to that temple in Ithaca, one of the mockers in the Jewish community challenged me on my maps. She basically said, you know, the Arabs are the migrants and she said that the last independent indigenous nation was 2,000 years ago. She referred me to a right-wing blog for accurate information.

I was at World Fellowship in New Hampshire, which is a wonderful family camp for progressives. A woman in the audience told me this amazing story. Her child was attending public school in the New York City school system. They were studying indigenous peoples. As an example, the teacher stated that the Jews were the indigenous people and the Palestinians were treating them badly.

The daughter, being her daughter, piped up. She said, “No, no, no.

It’s really, you know, the other way around.” The girl was sent out of class to the principal’s office. Her parents were called in. They were given a stern warning about that kind of talk. When the mother agreed with the daughter, the principal actually said that that version of history is not allowed in the New York City school system.

Just recently, I got this award from my town in Brookline for social justice work on Israel-Palestine. Both of the elected officials in the Massachusetts legislature boycotted the event—they’re usually presenting the awards—and one funder pulled out. So that’s what you see in your community.

If we look at the issue of framing and language, the framing is the Jews are good; the Arabs are bad. And you think about the visuals. In our newspapers, there’s a tendency towards the sympathetic Jewish settler, mother crying over her injured child, and the young men wrapped in a keffiyeh throwing a rock. That’s the visuals you see. There’s an emotional message in our media that rarely portrays Palestinians as fellow human beings who may actually have some incredibly legitimate grievances and who actually are rarely violent. Palestinians are never seen as

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the most educated group in the Arab world. They’re never seen as the people with a long tradition of nonviolent resistance. You just don’t see that.

The question is, why is history like that? Because history in our world is really a creation of groupthink. If you go back in history, for decades, Palestinian history, trauma, aspirations, rights have been really invisible in Western discourse. I think it’s partly a reflection of our own racism towards Arabs, our Islamophobia, guilt about the Holocaust, and manipulation by Zionist leaders. Then we add in cultural, economic, and military imperialism.

So how far does this go back? Well, there was early silencing of the Palestinian experience by U.S. Zionists in the 1940s and the 1950s. Even back then, you would be viciously attacked if you criticized the partition plan, if you criticized Jewish nationalism and all that kind of stuff, or you mentioned that there was a Palestinian tragedy. And so journalists were accused of antiSemitism. They were threatened. Politicians were threatened with loss of financial support.

I mean this goes way back to the founding of Israel. Then, as was mentioned, in 1974 the Anti-Defamation League officially defined what they call the new anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel.

Ten years later, AIPAC issued this college guide exposing the, quote, anti-Israel campaign on campus which they still think is going on, and basically was trying to tell students why they shouldn’t listen to people who are critical of Israel because they’re all obviously foreign terrorists and anti-Semitic.

So, you see, this kind of McCarthyism crept into Jewish institutions, and the epithet of anti-Semitism has been used ever since to silence and demonize critical voices. The Israelis joined in the fray with the Herzliya Conference in 2010, where they had a whole session on winning the battle of the narrative, and it’s all about rebranding. It’s a PR problem. Then a year later, the Reut Institute in Tel Aviv—it’s a think tank—issued a position paper laying out a strategy of, quote, naming and shaming those on the left who are critical of various things.

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The important thing is that they identify the strategy to engage Jewish institutions and individuals to identify and marginalize groups, to separate medium-sized liberals from more critical liberals, and to create this Israeli brand. You also see that point. They go against people who are delegitimizing Israel. So that’s another, you know, word that comes up.

What’s happening now is a direct result of those kinds of policy decisions. People talked about shielding Israel from the abuse of human rights law. Then in 2011, Haaretz reported that there was actually an Israeli military intelligence unit that was created to monitor folks like us. In academia, we have Hillel International, which is the umbrella organization for the Hillel chapters on American campuses. It did start out not as a Zionist organization, but it’s basically become an Israel advocacy organization. Despite espousing pluralism and tolerance, they actually have very strict guidelines about what you’re allowed to talk about and what kind of speakers you’re allowed to have.

And in December of 2014, Hillel International and the Simon Wiesenthal Center developed a new campus surveillance tool, which is a phone app, to fight anti-Semitism, which will be deployed on 550 U.S. campuses with Hillel centers. It’s supposed to report students and professors who are being antiSemitic. They call it See It and Report It. The Anti-Defamation League last December also published a list, a blacklist, of those who have linked what’s going on in Ferguson with what’s going on in Palestine.

Also, as was mentioned, there’s been more than 6,000 U.S. police trained in Israeli police and military units, and this is funded by the ADL. It’s also funded by JINSA, which is another group to watch, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. You may not know that the New York City Police Department now has a branch in Tel Aviv. So we now have our police emulating the Israel Defense Forces. We have academics being monitored and attacked. We have university donors pressuring administrators.

We have groups sympathetic to Palestinians being confronted with lies. I suggest you Google “Hamas on campus.” It’s a really interesting YouTube. Then people are emotionally blacklisted and, you know, called anti-Semitic.

Now, in the Jewish community there’s actually a tremendous conflict, because Jews have traditionally been more left-wing on every other right but Palestine. Many of us, particularly people under 35, which obviously doesn’t include me, feel that we are being asked to suspend our love of justice, democracy and fighting for the oppressed when it comes to Israel-Palestine. We see very

right-wing forces, Campus Watch, StandWithUs, CAMERA, AIPAC, David Project, etc., etc., etc. aligned with the Christian right lobbying Congress to support the most right-wing governments in Israel. I call this our own U.S. branch of the Likud. Then we have muzzling of dissent, intolerance in our own community.

So these assumptions are reinforced. You know, the Jews are the good people; Arabs are the bad people. Jews are like us.

They’re white people creating a Western-style state in a savage untamed region of the world. So after ’67, there was this move towards making uncritical support of Israel the cornerstone of being a good Jew. Being a Jew and a Zionist are now merged, and Israel is the religion. Christian Zionists marched up and embraced the idea. We all got to return so we can have an apocalypse. So they embraced this settler movement. Liberal Christians then bought the mythology. The U.S. government developed our huge military industrial complex. With this framing, the history and trauma and aspirations of Palestinians become more and more invisible.

So this manipulation happens by controlling the message.

How is that done? We have Birthright trips, which are basically brainwashing. We have students that have been recruited and, I’ve heard, paid to use social media to compliment Israel. They call this public diplomacy. There are a ton of free junkets for all kinds of people, ranging from academics to food and wine critics, to go to Israel. We have all the academic collaborations. We have our Israeli ambassadors in all sorts of Jewish settings and forcing what the message is. So there is this multimillion-dollar industry to brand Israel with pink washing, green washing, faith washing, and all those kind of things.

The good news is that there is pushback. There’s a lot of pushback toward green washing and pink washing and faith washing.

If you don’t know what it is, just ask me. There’s also pushback within the Jewish community. We are not monolithic. More than 50 percent of Jews in America, particularly those under 35, have no interest in Israel or feel some sympathy for Palestinians. The interesting thing for me as a confirmed secular Jew is that many groups are questioning all of this framing using Jewish values and doing it in the name of Jewish religion. So I have young students telling me Zionism has hijacked Judaism.

We keep mentioning Jewish Voice for Peace. This is an example of the growth of one of those kinds of groups. We tripled in size during the Gaza war. A group called If Not Now came out during the Gaza war demanding the Jewish communal organizations recognize the Gaza dead. We have the Open Hillel Movement, which

“”

Silencing challenges free speech, rights of protest. It’s all about power, about fear.

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is demanding that Hillels do not monitor and have these red lines.

These kids are having these conferences breaking all the rules, talking about BDS in Hillels. It actually did happen just in February at Harvard. Three civil rights leaders from the ’60s got up and talked about BDS at Harvard Hillel. We’re all very happy.

The other thing that you’re seeing is what I call an increase in intersectionality, so that there are unified coalitions forming between students of color, Muslim students from colonized countries, queer and trans students, feminists, all seeing the links between the oppression of Palestinians and their own oppressions.

So in conclusion, because I’m going to get this in 18 minutes, what is happening to Jews and their allies is a loud battle about the meaning and understanding of history. We’re separating Judaism the religion from Zionism the national political movement.

We are making a call to define the Jew as someone grounded in religion or culture or history, a set of ethics, a sense of peoplehood. And all these definitions are equally compelling. It does not matter if you’re in the Diaspora, you know, because Israeli Jews

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think us Diaspora Jews are not really first-rate Jews. So Diaspora Jews are really reclaiming our legitimacy and our voice as Jews.

There’s a delineation of the racist ideology of anti-Semitism from thoughtful moral criticism of the policies of the country of Israel, and the treatment and solidarity of Palestinians has now become the civil rights movement of our day. We see major challenges such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, the Campus Open Hillels, Students for Justice in Palestine, etc. We have African-American civil rights leaders embracing this issue and drawing parallels with our civil rights struggles. With all of the increased amount of information that we now have access to, you really can’t hide reality anymore.

And I would like to propose that the intensity of the backlash and the muzzling may also reflect that the mainstream and right-wing forces are feeling increasingly cornered. Their positions are less defensible. Perhaps this is the beginning of a major turning point in the long struggle for justice in Israel-Palestine.

Thank you. ■

The Use of Cultural Stereotypes to Shape Policy Dr. Jack Shaheen

Moderator Askia Muhammad: Jack Shaheen is an acclaimed author and media critic. He’s a filmmaker whose writings illustrate that the damaging racial and ethnic stereotypes of Arabs, blacks and others injure innocent people. Dr. Jack Shaheen is a distinguished visiting scholar at New York University. He served as a CBS News consultant—how did you ever get that job?—on Middle East affairs and as a professional film consultant. Please welcome Dr. Jack Shaheen.

Jack Shaheen: Joseph Goebbels would probably use the Arab proverb by repetition, even a donkey learns, to initiate his propaganda. And Alice [Rothchild], Israeli, Jew, equal good; Arab, Muslim equal evil is the subject of my brief comments this morning. I want to thank you.

Let me start with another Arab proverb: One hand alone does not clap. And I’m very humbled and honored to be here with my Jewish and Israeli colleagues who receive criticism from both sides. It’s just good to be together to work towards peace and to bring people together. One more quote, Sophocles. I’ll paraphrase Sophocles. Those who tell the stories rule society. And Jack Valenti, former president of the Motion Picture Association of

America, “Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA.” And, finally, the last quote. My wife loves it when I use quotes. You have to either blame her or credit her. While I was walking in the hall, I saw this terrific photograph of my hero when I was a young man teaching documentary film, Edward R. Murrow. And Murrow’s great quote, “What we do not see is as important, if not more important, than what we do see.” And I sincerely hope someone would send that message to C-SPAN, because they’re not here today.

Believe me, there are wonderful Israeli filmmakers that do not do what the Israeli filmmakers I’m talking about today do. I want to start with Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who in the 1980s bought a motion picture company called Cannon Films. They turned out dozens of films that vilified Arabs and Muslims. No one really wrote about this or discussed this. The only person to bring it to light was my friend Arthur Lord, who since passed on, a Jewish-American who worked for NBC News. He did a special for NBC on the Today Show and received just hundreds of hate mails.

But I thought, to get things started, liven it up, we’d show a quick clip of some Golan and Globus films, plus a few others. And then The Israel Lobby Conference

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I’ll move on to television and we’ll wrap it up. Can we show the GolanGlobus [from “Reel Bad Arabs”]?

PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Another way we can look at the connection between politics and entertainment, Washington and Hollywood, is the manner in which, historically, cinema has projected the Palestinian people.

Since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, our support has never wavered. Every American administration has made it clear whose side we’re on. In contrast, Washington’s policymakers have failed to support the millions of Palestinians who have been made refugees and who have lived lives of poverty and squalor as a result. Well, policies impact opinions, so it’s equally unjust how Hollywood has presented the conflict. Movies repeatedly depict Palestinians as terrorists, making it seem that all Palestinians are evil.

Now, that image has been perpetuated by Hollywood films, beginning with the film “Exodus” that dealt with the very early conflict. Here, Palestinians are either invisible or they’re linked with Nazis, perpetrators of horrific acts. A 1966 movie, “Cast a Giant Shadow,” is another early film presenting Israelis as innocent victims of Palestinian violence. Kirk Douglas is an American military specialist and he goes to assist the Israelis. Some of the dialogue in this film reads like it came straight from a public relations department of the Israeli government. “Here’s a country surrounded by five Arab nations ready to shove them into the Mediterranean. No guns, no tanks, no friends—nothing—people fighting with their bare hands for a little piece of desert.”

The Palestinians in this movie are the lowest of the low. We see them solely as vicious gunmen, wide-eyed maniacs. They will kill anyone, anywhere, any time, for any reason. There’s one brutal image in particular of a burnt-out bus with a dead Jewish woman tied to its side with a Star of David carved into her back. And when the Palestinians finally speak, they mock and psychologically terrorize another woman trapped in the bus.

Well, if we jump forward a decade to the film “Black Sunday,” the Palestinian terrorist is now a woman. “Striking where it hurts them most, I feel most at home.” She flies the Goodyear blimp into a Miami stadium and tries to wipe out 80,000 Americans at the Super Bowl. She cold-bloodedly eliminates anyone in her path.

The movies that we see basically follow Washington’s policies.

It’s reflected in the cinema over and over again, particularly during the 1980s and the ’90s, where you had perhaps 30 films which showed Palestinians as a people who were intent on injuring all

Americans. One of the most despicable portrayals of Arabs and Palestinians occurs in the 1987 film “Death Before Dishonor.” First, they murder a guard, and then slaughter an Israeli family. They kidnapped and tortured an American Marine, and in cold blood executed another.

And they burned the American flag right in front of the American Embassy, and then dispatch a suicide bomber to blow it up.

One reason we’ve not been allowed to empathize with any Palestinian on the silver screen is due to two Israeli producers, Manahem Golan and Yoram Globus. These two filmmakers created an American company called Cannon, and they released in a period of 20 years, at least 30 films, which vilify all things Arab, particularly Palestinians. They even came out with a film called “Hell Squad,” showing Vegas showgirls trouncing Arabs in the middle of the desert.

END OF VIDEO TRANSCRIPT I think the Vegas showgirls, I think, is a good way to wrap up the Golan-Globus film. These were, of course, aimed at teenagers.

They’re all B- films, but very successful movies.

There are a couple of myths American filmmakers, television producers, as well as some Israelis perpetuated. One was the land without people, that there are no Palestinians. Two, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. And, three, the only Palestinians that exist are terrorists.

Now, if we fast forward to today, and this really disturbs me— well, let’s go back to 1996. 1996 was the first real Israeli introduction to American television. That’s when CBS-TV introduced Ziva David, who was a Mossad agent, through a very successful series called “NCIS.” Not only did David wear a Star of David, she also wore an IDF uniform to show the military influence on her character. Harvard University professor Eitan Kensky identified David as, “the most prominent televisual Israeli” in the United States. Her depiction was praised for exposing the Western public to Israeli society and culture, its positive portrayal of an Israeli and its cheerleading role in promoting the ties between the United States and Israel. Now, here she is working with American agents, not only killing Arabs and Arab-American and Muslim-American terrorists here, but throughout the world, even in Israel. There’s one episode where she goes to Israel and kills some of the most ugly Palestinians. I can’t watch it again. I mean, I’ve watched so many TV shows and films, but this one took the cake. Anyway, that show lasted for nine years.

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Can you imagine—there was no press on this—if two filmmakers called Hishmi and Hunaidi created Cannon Films and vilified Jews and Israelis the way Golan and Globus vilified Arabs and Palestinians, what might the press have been like? And why didn’t the producer of “NCIS” include a Palestinian heroine working with “NCIS”? You know, call her Leila Rafidi or Leila Inadah. They could have done dabke and the hora all at the same time. But no, no, no, we have to have this biased point of view over and over again.

I’ve been talking about this issue for more than four decades now. I gave my first speech at the American University in April of 1975. What I keep trying to hammer home gently—very gently—is entertainment as propaganda. We don’t see it as propaganda. We think it’s mere fluff. The films of Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany were more effective than Germany’s propaganda films. So we cannot look at these films in a vacuum and think they’re pure fluff.

If we fast-forward to today, there are two Is raeli producers, Avi Nir and Gideon Raff, responsible for some of the most horrific anti-Arab shows I’ve seen in my life, “Tyrant,” “Dig” and “Homeland.” “Homeland,” you know, it’s sort of like “24” for grown-ups. I understand the Israeli version is much better than this one. If you haven’t seen “Tyrant,” don’t. It’s been renewed for another season. It’s all about this mythical Arab country where Arabs kill Arabs, slaughter Arabs.

The one brother seduces women while the family watches, even rapes his daughter-in-law. “Dig” is set in Jerusalem. You’d never know there were Arabs in Jerusalem at all. They don’t appear— except last week, they did appear. They attacked a car with one of our diplomats, beat up our diplomat and the Israeli driver.

That’s the only time in four episodes I’ve seen a Palestinian, except for one guy called Khalid who runs from place to place.

And if you see the movie—it’s the Brad Pitt movie—in that film, they say Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. It’s “World War Z,” I don’t know if you’ve seen “World War Z” or not, but that, again, is a theme that’s repeated over and over again.

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So there has been no press on this Israeli presence and how they portray Arabs on American television—these two producers.

And they convey a very hard line, a very biased perspective of how Arabs are perceived, how we think of Arabs. Last night, before going to bed, I flicked on the TV channel because I couldn’t sleep, and I was watching “The Blacklist.” There’s a key player in “The Blacklist,” the Mossad agent, who wiped out some Iranian terrorists. What we talked about earlier today with my distinguished panelists that brought about in terms of the presence of government, our government, working with the Israelis, holds true as well in the entertainment industry.

So let me conclude. I need my glasses for this because I wrote it down, and I can’t remember it.

Here we go. I want to conclude on an optimistic note. Joseph Lowery, a humble man, champion of civil rights, this was at President Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration, he reminds us that those who have vilified Arabs and Muslims in the past have the ability to eliminate them.

They just need to embrace the wisdom of Lowery: “Lord, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance; and help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in the back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man.”

And I added this phrase, “When the Israeli and Arab men get it right and see the light and refuse to fight.”

I began with “those who tell the stories rule society.” When we begin to tell the stories, American and Israeli filmmakers, when we begin to tell stories now more than ever before, fresh new stories, stories that shatter stereotypes, stories that humanize the people, stories that conquer fears, stories that create new ways of seeing, new ways of thinking and feeling, when we create those stories, we will crush hate and advance peace. So it reminds us that all humankind is truly one family in the care of God. Thank you very much. ■ The Israel Lobby Conference

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Moderator Askia Muhammad: That, again, was Dr. Jack Shaheen who provided us the Las Vegas review. Thank you. Time for questions and we have many questions. Why don’t we start here, and we’ll extend our time with Dr. Rothchild. Why don’t you do a couple questions. Then Dr. Falk has many questions directed to him. I think I have one question also for Dr. Shaheen. But we’ll start with Dr. Alice Rothchild.

Alice Rothchild: I’m going to address a couple of questions. I just want to say on the issue of the action…

Askia Muhammad: Let me interrupt. I’m sorry. I apologize. I had a note; I left it.

Please, be reminded that Jack Shaheen will be signing his book after this panel at 11:45. That’s a commercial from our sponsor.

I’m sorry.

Alice Rothchild: That’s okay. And I’m signing my book at 1:05, no commercial. I just wanted to add to that the action film called “Dig,” which is filmed in East Jerusalem. There were over 20 Palestinian civil society activist groups that protested the filming of the film in East Jerusalem. What people don’t know is that the Israeli government and Jerusalem municipality gave the film people a $6.2 million grant to make that film. So this is also Israeli propaganda—hasbara—stuff going on. But that wasn’t the question.

So the first question is, “what is anti-Semitism,” which is a fabulous question, “and how does it relate to Zionism?” So let me give you the two-minute answer to something that people write Ph.D. theses on. The way I define anti-Semitism is hating Jews because they are Jews. That’s the main reason to hate them or the organization they’re in or whatever. How does Zionism mesh with being Jewish? If you look historically at Zionism for a kabillion years, there was sort of a religious Zionism, the Zionism of my Orthodox grandfather. It was a messianic—who knows when the Messiah will come? And it was that kind of religious mythical Zionism. It wasn’t actually meant that something would actually happen in the near future.

And then in the late 1800s, with Herzl and the first Zionist Congress, there was an increasing movement amongst Eastern European intellectuals to respond to the horrific amount of Christian anti-Semitism that occurred in Europe. And they, along with all sorts of other groups, were having movements of nationalism, so it’s in that context of nationalism, and also in the context of colonialism, developed the idea that the Jews needed an actual place to go to be safe. They were kind of vaguely helped by the British Empire.

They promised the same piece of land to the Arabs and the Jews.

And I think one of the things to remember is that Lord Balfour, with

the Balfour Declaration, had Christian Zionist tendencies. So there were a lot of anti-Semitic reasons why colonial powers wanted to get rid of their Jews and put them someplace else.

There was actually a tremendous debate within the Jewish intellectual community. I put Martin Buber on one side and Herzl on the other. Should there be an actual place? Should it be in Uganda?

Should be it Palestine? Should it be a binational state? Should it be a Jewish-only state? I mean, this was a major, major debate. I think it’s important to understand that. The people who wanted a Jewish-only state won out, so the rest is history. At this point, when I use the word Zionism, I’m referring to a political Zionism as it is currently practiced. And the way I define it as currently practiced is a belief that Jews, for either historical, Holocaust, biblical, whatever reasons, deserve or must have a state that is for Jews and that privileges Jewish people over everybody else. That is what’s going on in Israel right now and in the occupied territories.

The reason that I think it is really important to separate Jews from Zionists is that, first of all, many Jews are not Zionists.

Zionism is a political movement that I think in retrospect has had really catastrophic implications, both to non-Jews and to Jews. I would argue the political Zionism, as it is now practiced, is incredibly dangerous to Jews. When I look at the state of Israel and I look at the policies of the state of Israel, I can’t find anything Jewish about it except singing “Hatikvah” in Hebrew. I mean, seriously. When I’m at a checkpoint and there’s some 20-year-old pointing a big gun at me and accusing all the civilian Palestinian women that I’m surrounded by of something, this is not Jewish.

This is not Jewish values. It is not Jewish history. It’s just not related to any of my understanding of what it means to be a Jew. So I put that under Zionism and under political Zionism and under occupation and under oppressing some other people because they’re not Jewish. Even in the state of Israel, 20 percent of the citizens are Palestinians, and they are second-class citizens. They get less of everything.

So for me, founding a state that by definition privileges Jews over everybody else is doomed to chronic catastrophe and, ultimately, to failure. And I think that’s very different than Jews as a religion or an ethnicity or as a culture. So that’s why I keep those very, very separate.

Richard Falk: I thank you for a series of questions, which I cannot do justice to. But let me, at least, address one that I think raises a very important question. The question asked: “Israel has ignored with impunity numerous U.N. resolutions. Why has there been no effort in the General Assembly to decertify Israel from the U.N.?” In effect, there is no constitutional veto in the General

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weaponry—mostly from us—but they have developed a huge Assembly. The great majority of governments in the world are system of collaborators and a malicious kind of security system to highly critical of Israel. But what I think one doesn’t understand, keep a population under control. So what our American cities and I probably didn’t make clear enough in my remarks, is that in want to do is to learn how to control us. They want to learn how addition to the constitutional veto that exists within the U.N. to control protest and crowds. They want to learn how to fight Charter and the way in which the structure of the U.N. is set up, “terrorism,” as it is getting more and more broadly defined. And there has emerged a geopolitical veto which paralyzes the orgaIsrael is supposed to have the best product. So that’s what our nization at the level of implementation. The U.N. General policemen are doing in Israel.

Assembly can say what it wants. It can declare things. It can proThe other thing that is very, very worrisome, I think, is, for pose fact-finding inquiries into the attacks on Gaza of the sort instance, if you look at the wall between the U.S. and Mexico, that the Goldstone Report did. is partly built by an Israeli company because they’re also really But it’s incapable of implementing the recommendations that good at building walls to keep people out or in or whatever they’re follow from those initiatives or of enforcing or achieving complidoing. The thing that gets even more messy about this whole ance with its resolutions. That’s because the U.N. was created thing is that our U.S. military now has all this excess equipment— with the idea that it is an instrument of statecraft, not an alternanow that we’re not actively killing a whole bunch of people. We’re tive to it. The U.N. is very important symbolically and in waging just kind of doing it more slowly. So the military is now giving our this struggle to control the heights of international law and police departments tanks and, you know, things you might need morality, which mobilize people. There wouldn’t be a BDS moveto do if you’re doing traffic in Idaho or something. So we have a ment or an anti-apartheid campaign if there hadn’t been a U.N. police that are weaponized by our excess military equipment that to create a consensus that what Israel is doing and what South are trained in Israel. That means that we are all at risk. I always Africa was doing were fundamental violations, not only of interlike to remind people that this is not some little conflict off in some national law, but of the most basic ideas of international morality, crazy country. This is going to come [back] to bite us. The reason and constitute, in effect, crimes against humanity. that we have our Fergusons and all the black men that are just The U.N. is important for mobilizing a moral consciousness assassinated, shoot-to-kill, is for a reason. And these are the kind around the world. But it’s incapable, due to its structure and due to of forces that go into making that true in our society. the way in which world order is organized on a global basis, to Moderator Askia Muhammad: Red lights are flashing. Tones create the behavioral changes that that moral consciousness calls are beeping. It is time for us to take a break. As much as we for. That depends on civil society. There is growing realization, I might want to hear more, it is time for us to take a break. I think think, that governments are not going to solve this problem, and we should stick with our discipline and carry on as the previous that the U.N. cannot solve this problem. That it will depend on the panel did and not be a bad example for those who have yet to mobilization of people. That’s why, in my view, the growing global speak. So, please, take a break. Dr. Falk will be signing books in solidarity movement and the organizations like Jewish Voice for 10 minutes. I’m glad to be here. I’m glad you’re here. ■ Peace and the BDS campaign are so important at this stage of the struggle.

Alice Rothchild: I’m being asked, “what is the New York Police Department doing in Israel?

There are no blacks there to kill, except Ethiopian Jews.” First of all, that’s not quite correct. There are Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers who are black, who are subjected to a horrific amount of racism, so there are blacks to kill. But that’s not the answer.

The thing that you need to understand [about] Israeli PR is that one of their biggest products is security. And that they really know how to do crowd control. They’ve been occupying a whole ton of people for decades now, so they have the expertise to do crowd control and to fight terrorism. And when you sort of investigate this a Arab League Ambassador Mohammed Al-Hussaini (second from left) is one of many little bit, not only do they have the most advanced conference attendees lining up for a signed copy of a book by speaker Dr. Jack Shaheen.

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PANEL 3: Is Freedom of Speech Encouraged on American Campuses?

Is Freedom of Speech Encouraged on American Campuses?

Helena Cobban

Moderator

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PANEL 3

Introduction by Moderator Helena Cobban

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kay, if everybody could come in that would be great, and sit down and be quiet and make sure your devices have all been silenced, because we have another wonderful set of treats here. I think honestly if I’d been organizing a conference, I would have had it be a three-day conference with all this richness of people and participants and interactions and information, but anyway we are so blessed to have so many wonderful people here in town together. Thank you all for quieting down so we can hear the next great panel.

I’m Helena Cobban, I’m the CEO of a company called Just World Books that was founded by myself with the goal of expanding the discourse in this country on issues of vital global concern, and as it happens, most of our books recently have been about Palestine, including this fabulous title

by Nora Barrows-Friedman which speaks directly to the experiences that you’re going to hear in person from Ahmad, Amani and Dima right now. This book and many other fine books are available for sale at the Washington Report bookstand, which also has olive oil and Palestinian tchotchkes and all kinds of wonderful things. I urge you to support them by going and buying all those great products. That’s the commercial interlude for me.

We’re going to start with Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, who is the founding editor-in-chief of <muslim girl.net>, a blog aimed at eliminating stereotypes surrounding Islam and promoting the place of Muslim women in Western society. By the way, in case you didn’t know, this whole panel is about what’s happening on the college campuses these days, which is absolutely crucial to the future of this issue. That’s why it’s particularly great to have this youthful energy here. It comes with an enormous amount of experience of organizing on campuses. Amani ran into trouble with Rutgers University trustees and its daily newspaper, The Daily Targum, which decided that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. In June 2012, the ADC named Al-Khatahtbeh its media relations specialist. So we’re delighted to hear first and foremost from Amani Al-Khatahtbeh.

(L-r) Ahmad Saadaldin, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, moderator Helena Cobban and Dima Khalidi.

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Daring to Speak Out on Campus Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

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Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: Good morning/almost afternoon, everyone. I’m really honored to be opening up this panel. It is definitely crucial to the conversation surrounding how we’re going to be talking about Israel and Palestine, and how we’re going to shape politics in the future. So I’m excited to have this panel here. I thank the organizers for allowing us this opportunity to speak on these topics with such a distinguished audience and amongst such amazing speakers that all of us have been referencing all throughout college for the work that we’ve done. So I want to start out by posing a question to the room. I want to hear your thoughts, your opinions. I want to bring up this column—that just went away completely.

Someone can help me with this, please?

Audio-video person: Working the audio-visuals: I got you.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: Thank you. Okay. Until it comes back up on the screen behind me, I want to read aloud what it says. It’s a column that was published in The Daily Targum, Rutgers University’s student newspaper. And it was written in criticism of a new building that Hillel was raising funds for on our campus. They had a huge building in the center of our university, and they were raising funds to make an even bigger one to be able to provide even more services to the campus community. This article was published around that time. It’s called, “Can Hillel’s funding be put to better use elsewhere?” In the column, Colleen Jolly, the writer, says: “If you know anything about Israel, you can conclude that proIsrael parties are good at getting money into funds, i.e., the purchases of Jewish National Fund in modern-day Palestine. On Dec. 2, the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, where Rutgers University is situated, a federally and privately funded agency, raised $400,000 at a telethon held at the Douglass Campus Center. I am not 100 percent sure where this money is going, but seeing that they used the university building, my only guess would be that the university, or specifically, to the proposed Hillel building.

This building is to be named after Eva and Arie Halpern.”

Colleen brought up an interesting point, right? Her column didn’t take into account how that money was being accrued or the fact

that Hillel’s building was being privately funded. But it brought up some links that she saw with pro-Israel organizations and parties across the country, or what she viewed as her own experiences with them. Now, does this column have anti-Semitic undertones? Do you think so?

Audience: No. Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: Okay. I want to keep that in mind as we look at this next column. Now, Colleen Jolly was a student. This column was published by the same newspaper, Rutgers’s daily paper, by a man who actually has an official position as a rabbi at Hillel on campus. This was published a few years prior. It was during the uproar on Operation Cast Lead. Rabbi [Dovid] Weiss says: “Standing on the steps of Brower Commons on College Avenue campus, they held a vigil for”—referring to [BAKA], an organization that later became known as SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] on campus—“the 1,400 lives lost during the war in Gaza more than two years ago, The Daily Targum reported. Yet students and staff who came for the ambience of a peaceful vigil that night may not have known that they were involved in a vigil which mourned the deaths of terrorists.

“Included in the number of victims being mourned were a whopping 600 to 700 Hamas terrorist operatives that were also killed in the Gaza war. Student groups paying homage to known terrorists fuel fear, hatred, resentment, and divides our campus community. This kind of activity is much more common, more hostile, in radically charged campuses. University students were exposed to paying tribute to fallen terrorists under the guise of innocent civilians.”

Now, does this column seem racist?

Audience: To be honest, yeah.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: Right? I mean I’m not going to bring up anti-Semitism and how it also applies to Arabs and how this could be applicable as anti-Semitism. But it’s interesting that this [Colleen Jolly] column received an entire uproar. I actually published this column. I was the opinions editor of the student newspaper at that time. This came to my desk and I decided to run with it. We edited it. It was much more offensive before we decided to The Israel Lobby Conference

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publish it. But I and several other editors went through the editing process with it, went forward with it, because I felt like there were much worse things published in this newspaper before for other groups, right? If we’re going to be boasting about freedom of speech in our college newspaper, it should apply to all types of columns that we receive. It shouldn’t be filtered based on who we’re talking about. But this op-ed turned out to be the one that launched a thousand other op-eds.

This was the result. This was a public statement issued by the editor-in-chief, who was my boss at that time. This decision was made completely without my consideration at all, even though I was the editor of that page. In it, he says basically that they had decided to take down the article. “Looking back, elements in that piece relay discriminatory undertones that do not reflect the values and goals of our organization. These elements, which I personally find distasteful and irrelevant, greatly overshadow any sort of argument the author was trying to make.”

What happened was, as a result of that op-ed by Colleen Jolly about Hillel’s building, a series of actions were taken by the newspaper that were not taken when it came to the way that the newspaper published articles about other entities, other parties in this conversation around Israel and Palestine. They removed Colleen Jolly’s column from the website completely, which was almost unheard of. They even issued a retraction in the corrections of the printed newspaper the following week. They released a public

statement, which takes a lot to get from our editorial staff at The Targum. On top of that, something that happened behind the scenes that didn’t receive much visibility at all…by the pressure of Hillel around this column, they were able to get the board of trustees to implement sensitivity training to every incoming editor on how to identify anti-Semitic undertones in columns that they’re editing. Then on top of that, in case you thought that wasn’t enough, they also decided, the board of trustees told the editorial staff that from that year forth, any column or letter to the editor, anything that was submitted to them that was on Israel or Palestine had to go straight to the board of trustees for their approval.

Now, number one, I’m pretty sure that’s literally the definition of censorship, if you want to open it up in a dictionary. Number two, if we’re talking about anti-Semitism, and that was the charge, what in the world does that have to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict? This really powerful influential organization on campus, Hillel, basically used this opportunity on this uproar around this column to create more pressure on the newspaper to censor itself on Israel. Because pro-Palestine sentiment on campus was getting a lot of traction.

It certainly did when I assumed office. I became the first Palestinian opinions editor that the newspaper had in its history. We’re talking about the oldest collegiate paper since the United States became the United States. I was also the only Arab editor for my entire editorial staff, so I guess that was kind of, you know, a sensitive thing in the office. On top of that, I was told by people that had worked there before that I was the first hijab-wearing Muslim woman that they had as an editor in the newspaper as well.

When I assumed my position, what exactly was I coming into?

When I was a freshman at Rutgers, the newspaper had a really awful, awful reputation for being very pro-Israel, very slanted. The opinions page only showed these really strong columns like the one you saw from Rabbi Weiss that were very distorted and showed only one side, one point of view to things. There was a lot of controversy on campus even then. These are statistics that were put together by students and faculty alike. They went back through an entire year-to-two-year span in the newspaper of the opinions page before I assumed office. This was two years before I received my desk as the opinions editor. They put together how many opinions articles were definitely published that are proPalestine, how many were published that were pro-Israel, and how many were neutral. As you can see, there are almost twice as many op-eds published that were pro-Israel than pro-Palestine.

This is what I was dealing with. Honestly, this was a huge motivation for me when I got invited to apply for the position. I was like, “Wow, this is something that I’ve been wanting to change since I was a freshman. So now I’m a junior, why not,” right? I went for it, and I got elected for the position. Lo and behold, immediately, literally, my first month in office—this is probably even the first week

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of me being the opinions editor—I was charged with bias immediately. Literally, one of the first op-eds that I published was submitted by a Hillel member on campus. It was about Iran, and Israel’s interests in U.S. policies in Iran, why the U.S. should be against Iran, etc., etc. The editorial process, like I mentioned earlier, goes through a series of editors.

This particular column received the exact same treatment any other column did. We put it through the editorial process, fact checked it. We edited it for length so it can fit into the paper so that we can even publish it in the first place. Immediately, that student and other really influential and vocal members of Hillel made a very public complaint against me that I was biased. I’m not entirely sure that I would have been accused of that had I been any other identity than an Arab-Muslim woman in that position.

Things started really heating up when it came to Targum on campus. I was under a lot of scrutiny. The spotlight was literally on me for what was being published, how it was being published, and the treatment that the op-eds were receiving.

One Hillel member, who had the position of being the Israel chair—so I’m assuming his position has something to do with promoting pro-Israel relations on campus or something—he actually started an entire blog dedicated to me and started having Hillel members that submitted op-eds also submit those same op-eds to him.

Then he made a blog where he would show what the original version was and what the edited version looks like. Then any edits that were made—that weren’t always mine, but they’re pretty typical, very usual edits—he would politicize them and attribute some great underlying intention behind it and really, you know, trying to rev up the sentiment around me that I’m like this biased, unreliable editor, and I shouldn’t be in my position. Interestingly enough, no other editor on our staff received that same type of treatment, that same type of scrutiny. No one else was really considered for whether they’re approaching the topic sensitively or not.

Now, as a result, for a number of times throughout my term, I was threatened for termination by the board of trustees. What wasn’t disclosed is that one member of the board of trustees is actually the mother of one of the leading officials of Hillel— entirely. That was something that they kept secret from us. Obviously, things already behind the scenes are politicized. The very close ties the board of trustees had with Hillel, they used that to try and increase pressure on me to decide what my editorial decisions were.

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Things really popped off when I published an op-ed that was pro-Palestine, because we had published one that was pro-Israel the day before. When I published the pro-Palestine one—that was probably the popping off point where everyone really attacked me for being biased. That particular official in Hillel, whose mother was on the board, she said that she had submitted a letter and I hadn’t picked hers over the pro-Palestine one and I should, because she’s a Hillel official, even though a pro-Palestine letter was published before hers.

They wanted to create a rule where any type of pro-Palestine letter was published, a pro-Israel letter had to be published alongside it—a major double standard, because countless pro-Israel letters were published without any kind of consideration towards the opposing side. They were telling the board of trustees, “We have to tell this editor, you know, she has to publish Hillel letters on Monday because that’s when the newspaper gets the most circulation. She has to publish pro-Israel letters alongside pro-Palestine letters.” Multiple times, they told me if I didn’t do exactly what they said, they were going to fire me.

I had many opportunities to expose what was happening behind the scenes. But this is an issue that I think Dima [Khalidi] is going to speak a lot for, with students on college campuses, is that they’re in a very vulnerable position. For me, I had to risk losing my job, which was my paycheck. I had to risk a reputation in my school for being editor if I got fired or if I got terminated. I was really confused. Also, when I reached out to the board of trustees before I realized this was all happening/coming from them, I expressed my concerns that I was being discriminated against. They responded to me by saying basically that I’m the one that should be worried, that I’m the one that they’re concerned with about bias, that I’m the one that is the problem. I started also wondering like, “Wait, am I doing something wrong?”

Then this was compiled. The same survey that was conducted years before I became the opinions editor, they conducted the same one for my term exactly. The op-eds that are published pro-Palestine and pro-Israel and neutrally on this topic during my term, and they found that again, even with a Palestinian MuslimArab woman as the opinions editor, there were still almost twice as many pro-Israel letters published during my term as proPalestine letters. But this is something that all the blogs and newspapers are writing about this issue. It was something that they never considered or covered in any of their coverage, which I think speaks a lot to it.

There were still almost twice as many pro-Israel letters published during my term as pro-Palestinian letters.

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For the end of my term, every editor gets the privilege of having a farewell column. That’s their opportunity to, you know, talk very emotionally about how much The Targum gave back to them, what they learned from their experience, etc. I finally had made it. I was at the finish line. I was like, “Yes, I didn’t get fired, I survived,” you know.

I was like, “This is a perfect opportunity for me to tell other students what exactly is happening behind the scenes. This is what I experienced.” I wrote up an entire column basically detailing exactly what happened from A to Z. My own editorial staff censored me. I didn’t even have to rely on the board of trustees anymore. My own co-editors, who witnessed everything that was happening, they told me, “No. We can’t publish this because it’s going to make our newspaper look bad.”

I was like, “All right. You’re going to censor me. I’m going to go to The Huffington Post.” Then The Huffington Post decided to publish it.

[Audience applause] Now, this is my first time writing for a major publication like this.

I was very relieved, because I was almost in tears when they were censoring me. I was like, “Wow, this is literally happening again even as I’m about to leave.” Thankfully, it turned out for the better, because this issue ended up receiving a national audience. It getting published in The Huffington Post is even the reason why I’m

here today. The ADC, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, it’s the largest civil rights organization in the country for Arab-Americans, they saw this. They reached out to me because they felt like I was being discriminated against. Then, only a couple of months later, when I was about to graduate from college, they reached out to me and recruited me to be their media relations specialist. [Applause] Now, I’m in DC, where these decisions are happening. Now, my time is up so I just want to wrap up with this HuffPo article. It was followed up by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

They wrote a blog about it. In the blog, they said, “Targum readers think that they are getting news on controversial topics from independent student editors. But instead, they seem to be getting the perspective of unknown members of a board of trustees working behind the scenes.”

Now, if college campuses are a microcosm of society, I hope that everyone keeps this in mind when we think about what’s really happening with our news today. Thank you.

Helena Cobban: Thank you so much, Amani. It really is wonderful for me to be here with three amazingly talented young Palestinian Americans. When I came to this country 30 years ago, it was very different, and here we see leadership being formed amongst a new generation of Palestinian Americans. ■

Pressures on Universities to Discipline And Punish Students and Faculty for Speech Activities Dima Khalidi

Moderator Helena Cobban: Our next speaker is an exemplar, Dima Khalidi. I said this the other day, I’ve known her since she was born, and it’s my real pleasure and honor to introduce her. She’s the founder of an organization now rebranded as Palestine Legal, formerly known as Palestine Solidarity Legal Support, which Dima said is kind of a mouthful. She will tell you what they do. It’s a small organization with currently three extremely active lawyers who provide legal support in circumstances exactly similar to what Amani said. One of the things a number of their staff attorneys said is that the First Amendment has no Palestine exception. Bear that in mind.

I’ve worked in the media in this country for 35 years and I was subject, even at the Christian Science Monitor over the years to

exactly the same kind of double standard that Amani talked about at Daily Targum. If I took a trip, then who is funding the trip? It would all be extensively interrogated and I had to report it. People who were reporting stuff from Israel, nobody ever examined who was paying for their trips. That stuff goes on in the media, in the national mainstream media, all the time, and the Christian Science Monitor was among the best of them. I’m glad that you guys are here to take up the struggle and take it to new levels. Dima Khalidi.

Dima Khalidi: Hello. It’s so nice to be here in such a full room— this is lovely. I think it’s crucially important that you hear about this issue—about the way that students on campuses are affected— from students themselves or recent students themselves. You

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know, it’s really their experiences that exemplify what Palestine Solidarity Legal Support (Palestine Legal for short) is seeing again and again around the country, and we work nationally, so we are getting a very good sense of how widespread this problem is. There is really a concerted effort among Israel advocacy groups in the U.S. to undermine and thwart campus activism for Palestinian rights.

There are dozens, dozens of national and local organizations that are contributing to this effort, and I think you’ve heard about some of them throughout the morning, and they are spending millions of dollars to mount campaigns against groups, against individuals—all intended to stop the momentum of the movement for Palestinian rights. And this has been now focused on campuses because of the energy of the student movement and because Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns are gaining strength, and students are spearheading a lot of those efforts, and that is a big threat to the status quo in this country and in Israel.

On the most basic level, we are dealing with efforts to curb dissent on one of the few issues that has long garnered unconditional bipartisan support in this, the nation’s capital, especially, as you all know, which is support for Israel. But such dissent is exactly what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is designed to protect. When government officials—including public university officials, right?—dictate the limits of acceptable public discourse, they are effectively censoring viewpoints that they disagree with. And universities, in general, have been exalted by the U.S. Supreme Court as “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas,’” and it has emphasized “the dependence of a free society on free universities.”

It has also repeated that free speech cannot be limited based on how uncomfortable it may make some people, because “[a] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”

Yet Israel advocacy groups have played a central role in encouraging public and private institutions to silence and punish dissent on the Israel-Palestine issue through a number of tactics—that often rely on complaints that students who support Israel are made uncomfortable by this discourse. The dissent in question is characterized by activities such as lectures, film screenings, creative actions like mock checkpoints on campuses, mock eviction flyers being posted in dorms to give a sense of

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what Palestinians go through every day, and boycott and divestment campaigns, of course. These are all forms of speech that are protected from government interference by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Palestine Legal has, since 2012, been tracking these efforts, and challenging them with legal advocacy on behalf of student activists facing backlash—like Amani, I think, showed—daily.

We’re getting an enormous amount of requests for help.

I’d like to elucidate some of the trends that Palestine Legal has observed in tracking the repression of Palestine activism on campuses especially. To give you some idea of the volume of requests for legal advice and reports of repression that we’ve gotten: in 2014, we documented over 240 requests and reports of incidents (which was more than double what we documented in 2013), and about 75 percent of these originating on campuses and involved students or academics, professors, faculty or others who are under attack. And so far this year, in just over 3 months of 2015, we’ve already documented over 115 requests for help and incidents of repression, again the majority on campuses.

Some of the most prominent tactics that Palestine Legal has documented include smear campaigns, legal complaints, disparate treatment by universities, and interference in student democratic processes.

I think we’ve heard a lot about smear campaigns. Richard Falk and Alice Rothchild spoke a lot to that, as has Amani, I think.

Smear campaigns include false accusations of anti-Semitism, as we know, against individuals and groups that criticize Israeli policies, and they rely on the false conflation of criticism of those policies with a hatred of Jewish people as a whole. Israel advocacy groups have long been promoting and attempting to codify a redefinition of anti-Semitism. If we listened to Alice Rothchild’s definition of anti-Semitism before, this new definition is designed to encompass anything that “delegitimizes,” applies “double standards” to or “demonizes” Israel. That can encompass anything and everything, as you can imagine. This re-definition recently appeared in student government resolutions which were passed at UC Berkeley and UCLA, as well as now in a California state resolution. While the definition has no legal basis precisely because it would undermine basic First Amendment rights to engage in political speech, it nevertheless stigmatizes those who are openly critical of Israeli policies, and increases pressure on universities to The Israel Lobby Conference

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curb such criticism. So these kinds of accusations really underlie almost all the incidents that we document at Palestine Legal.

False accusations of connections with groups that are designated as “terrorist organizations” by the U.S. government are also very pervasive, especially with students. There is a particularly pernicious effort to associate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters, of which there are dozens in schools across the United States, with Hamas, in particular, as with the “Hamas on Campus” website, that I think was mentioned earlier.

Another effort has been, again, ironically, named David Horowitz Freedom Center, recently posted on campuses around the country. You can see here they had “Students for Justice in Palestine” written on the top, and they depicted brutal Hamas activities against other Palestinians, and the hashtag #JewHaters at the bottom, and we saw these on campuses around the country.

The same organization, the Horowitz Freedom Center, also encouraged students to do mock hangings on campus to allegedly expose the hypocrisy of SJP and mock stonings on campus, again in reaction to SJP’s mock checkpoints on campus.

The chilling effect on academics and students is undeniable— who wants to be branded as an anti-Semite or a terrorist just for speaking out for Palestinian rights?

This has cost some, like Prof. Steven Salaita, their professional careers. His tenured appointment at the University of Illinois was terminated after the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) and the Jewish Federation launched a campaign in reaction to what? his tweets over the summer about the Gaza war. Some of them were impassioned, some of them might have been offensive to some people. But the campaign claimed that Salaita was a “baseless anti-Semite” and that hiring him presented “a real danger to the entire campus community, especially to its Jewish students.” The university responded to these complaints—including threats from major donors to pull their funding—and they refused to formalize his appointment because of his “uncivil” tweets that they said made him unfit to teach. So this man’s professional career has been effectively ruined.

Another common tactic that Israel advocacy groups employ at the university level is to file complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. These allege that Palestine activism on campus creates a hostile environment for Jewish students—specifically those who support Israel. Complaints against universities—and even the

mere threat of such complaints—put universities on the defensive.

No such complaints have succeeded thus far, legally. In fact, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates these complaints, has in fact dismissed roundly four such complaints, stating that the activities complained of were protected political speech, not harassment based on national origin or race, and that “exposure to such robust and discordant expressions, even when personally offensive, is a circumstance that a reasonable student in higher education may experience.” In other words, what is college for if not to challenge students’ preconceived notions of the world before they come in to college?

Despite these strong decisions from the Department of Education, the chilling effect is deeply felt. In order to avoid such complaints and accusations, or to show that they are effectively responding to them, universities are erecting obstacles to pro-Palestinian student activism, investigating student activities, and disproportionately punishing students and student groups because of the viewpoint that they are expressing.

To give you a taste of typical bureaucratic obstacles that we are seeing, students have reported to Palestine Legal the following: administrators repeatedly calling in students to explain their events to administrators, provide scripts of their street theater performances, or give names of individuals participating in their activities; schools requiring student groups to pay for their own security at their events because of complaints or expected protests from pro-Israel groups; administrators telling students that they can’t use the word “apartheid,” literally, or can’t use the name “Students for Justice in Palestine” for their student group because it is too controversial; excessive delays in approving events, which impedes their abilities to hold events; and changes in school policies in direct response to student activities so that they can’t repeat them again.

This kind of bureaucratic harassment has a cumulative effect on students, draining their time and resources, hindering their ability to put on events, and generally acting to dissuade and distract them from their organizing work.

Now investigations and disciplinary actions also commonly result from Israel advocacy groups’ pressure on universities.

Groups like the Zionist Organization of America and the again, ironically named, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (AFPT) pressured Northeastern University for years to shut down Palestine activism on that campus. And Northeastern has obliged—

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first by putting the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on probation for a brief walk-out they did of an event featuring an Israeli soldier talking about the ethics of the IDF; then by suspending the SJP chapter after they distributed mock eviction flyers in the dorms.

To understand the university’s reaction, we must understand the nature of the pressure that Northeastern has been under. AFPT first started a campaign called “Shame on NEU,” claiming that SJP was “calling for the Murder of Jews,” and “cheerleading Hamas,” among other baseless accusations. The ZOA compounded this with a threat to file a legal Title VI complaint [against Northeastern] because they claimed the university tolerated a “hostile environment” for Jewish students by employing professors that were critical of Israel and by allowing SJP to organize on campus.

The ZOA made sure to copy one of its own “major supporters,” Robert Shillman, who also happened to donate $3 million to the university to build “Shillman Hall,” and whose statue also happens to adorn the campus.

One incident at Loyola University in Chicago led to blatantly disparate disciplinary action against the SJP group there last fall. Students learned of a tabling event publicizing Birthright Israel trips, which was sponsored by the school’s Hillel chapter. They learned about this the night before. Several students, mainly Palestinian, spontaneously decided to line up at the table and try to register in an attempt to highlight the program’s discriminatory policies—only Jewish students are presumed to have a “Birthright” to the land that constitutes Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, and they are

offered free trips there. When the students lined up and calmly asked to register for a free trip—since, after all, their own grandparents hailed from now-destroyed villages in present-day Israel— students manning the table immediately complained to administrators. The university undertook a month-long investigation, and they eventually charged SJP as a group with six conduct violations, including “bias-motivated misconduct,” “harassment and bullying,” and a violation of school demonstration policies. SJP was ultimately found responsible for only 1 of the 6 charges, that of failing to register their demonstration 7 days in advance like the school requires. But for this infraction, the group was placed on probation for the remainder of the year and they couldn’t access any more school funds. Meanwhile, Hillel was also found responsible for failing to register their tabling event. Their sanction was vastly different—they were merely required to go and talk to administrators about what the registration policies were so that it would be clear to them in the future.

So this kind of disparate treatment and disproportionate punishment has come to characterize university reactions to Palestine activism on campus.

This spring, especially, we’ve seen a huge number of attempts to interfere in student democratic processes, especially around divestment resolutions—the spring happens to be a very big time for those on campuses. Just to give one quick example—the University of Toledo—the Jewish Federation pressured the student government to close a hearing on a divestment initiative to all but Hillel and the SJP chapter (even though others, of course, were supporting the initiative), and the two groups were barred from the hearing room while the other one presented their side so they couldn’t hear the others’ arguments. The Federation also held a closed-door session with the student government before on anti-Semitism to make that clear. Before the resolution even came to a vote, the judicial council declared that it was “unconstitutional” and “discriminatory,” and it stopped the vote from taking place.

There was an uproar from students and supporters, including a legal challenge by Palestine Legal and other attorneys, who wrote to the student government. The student government ended up allowing an open hearing, and the resolution passed, ultimately.

So what does this all mean? This doesn’t even begin to explain the depth of the problem, because we’re seeing such a huge number of cases like these that affect dozens and dozens and hundreds of individuals, students and faculty, etc. We really are

This kind of bureaucratic harrassment has a cumulative effect on students.

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witnessing a situation in which it has become impossible for students and faculty on U.S. campuses to speak out for Palestinian rights without being personally attacked, condemned as hateful and anti-Semitic, and punished by their universities in response to pressure by these Israel advocacy groups.

The incidents that we are documenting do point to an apparent “Palestine exception” to the First Amendment, a situation in which public officials find it acceptable to muzzle a certain viewpoint in order to appease a strong political constituency—and, often, big donors, of course.

In addition to the palpable effects on their direct targets, which I think Amani, Ahmad and Alice show very well, the emotional burden on people who are attacked in this way is something that is not really understood or talked about very much. These repression tactics work to restrict public debate on a critical issue and thereby help preserve the status quo on Israel-Palestine in this country. Universities, think tanks, policy makers and media outlets—if any of you are here—forsake their responsibility to address

one of the most prolonged human rights issues of our time when they accede to these pressure campaigns and inhibit people from speaking, protesting and taking collective nonviolent action to effect some kind of change. Without an honest and critical public conversation about this, U.S. policy in the region will continue to enable this state of occupation and subjugation.

Really, it is precisely because students and others on university campuses are reaching their peers, they are making connections between social justice movements and proposing a rights-based approach to the conflict, that Israel advocacy groups are putting their thumbs on the scales now. They know that it is on university campuses that the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements gained strength, and that youth are the drivers of change. It is upon us to ensure, ultimately, that these voices are heard, that efforts to suppress this movement are exposed and challenged, and that we allow discourse in this country to move beyond blind support for a repressive regime that we ourselves are enabling.

Thank you. ■

Overcoming Obstacles: SJP Successes Ahmad Saadaldin

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Moderator Helena Cobban: So next up, we’re going to have Ahmad Saadaldin, who’s a filmmaker, producer, creative writer, actor and grassroots organizer dedicated to sharing untold stories to raise awareness and create positive change.

As a public relations major at the University of South Florida, Ahmad organized the largest grassroots campaign in the university’s history, collecting more than 10,000 signatures calling on the school to divest endowment funds from corporations complicit in human rights violations.

So Ahmad, really looking forward to hearing your tales from college and maybe from since college.

Ahmad Saadaldin: Hello everyone. It’s an honor to be here.

My name is Ahmad Saadaldin and I’m a graduate from the University of South Florida. While I was there, I served as the president of Students for Justice in Palestine for two years, and I was

one of the main organizers of the divestment campaign that took place there. My presentation today is going to be about campus activism, overcoming obstacles and suppression, and achieving success.

I’m going to start with the obstacles that I think are very difficult for SJPs to overcome. Number one is active suppression of student organizations by student government and universities. And number two, the demonization of Muslim, Arab and SJP students and activists by pro-Israel organizations. So I’m going to try and help you understand some of the obstacles that we face by sharing with you my experience at USF and what we went through over there, and then trying to tie it in with what’s going on around the nation.

In January 2013, we started our divestment campaign. I went to the student government and I met with the senate president

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who was in charge of creating the agenda for the meetings, and I shared with him a copy of our divestment resolution. It was just a draft at the time and I asked for advice. I was trying to learn more about the process, how does it work, and he told me, “You should attend the student government meeting later that evening,” and he asked to keep a copy of our divestment resolution.

I couldn’t make it that evening, but a couple of our members could. They went to the meeting and they stayed, and they learned and they took notes. And at the end of the meeting, a complete stranger came up to them, got in their face, put his finger in their chests and said, “Dead on arrival.” They’re shocked. Who is this guy? What is he talking about? He goes on to say, “If your resolution touches the floor, I’ll veto it.” It turned out he was the student body president. Obviously, we were very disturbed by that, so I went back—I’ll explain in a while. I will show you his picture in a moment. His name is Brian Goff.

Anyway, I returned to the senate president and I told him what happened. He said, “Don’t worry about that. He won’t veto it because I won’t even let it touch the floor. I’ll never put it on the agenda. I sent your resolution to the university legal counsel, and they told me that divestment is illegal.” So before we even started our campaign, we were told: no political stances; dead on arrival; no international politics; and it won’t even touch my floor.

This was very concerning for us, especially since two months before we started our campaign the student body president sent a letter to Hillel during Operation Pillar of Cloud, when Israel slaughtered hundreds of civilians in Gaza. He told them, “As student body president, I support Israel’s right to self-defense on behalf of the student body.” So clearly, there’s a double standard about who and when we can take political stances.

After the backlash and suppression that we faced already, we gave up, right?

Wrong, we did not give up!

We learned that we could get our resolution in the form of a referendum. All we had to do was collect 1,500 signatures and we could get it on the ballot for student body elections—but there was one problem. We learned on Tuesday night that we had to collect the signatures by Friday, so we only had three days to do it.

So we gave up, right?

Wrong!

We collected 2,500 signatures. It was the largest petition in the University of South Florida history at the time. We collected the signatures. We followed the rules. We got it in on time.

So we got on the ballot, right?

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Wrong!

The night before student government elections were to begin, we received an e-mail from the student body president, the senate president, the university lawyer, the assistant dean of students and the election rules commissioner. They told us, your referendum will not be on the ballot because it’s illegal and it violates university policy. Which policy? They did not tell us.

In an e-mail from the assistant dean to the student body president, she asked, “What’s going to happen with the referendum?”

He responds, “We will not put it on the ballot.” As if it’s up to him.

As if he’s the king. He can decide. There are no rules. As if we violated some rule, we’re doing something illegal. Clearly, that wasn’t the case.

Now, the senate president who was very aggressive with us in the beginning and told us, “It won’t touch my floor”—it turns out he had a little bit of a conscience, and he replied by saying, “It is neither up to me or the student body president. We don’t have the authority to stop this referendum. We are violating the right to the referendum process.”

As soon as he said that, the university legal counsel told him, “If you put this on the ballot, you could be charged with a misdemeanor, and I am the lawyer and I’m advising you and I have to defend you, so I’m just letting you know.”

So he calls me Sunday night from his cell phone and he tells me, “I want to put this on the ballot, but they’re charging me with a misdemeanor, can you help me?” I got a lawyer and that lawyer immediately told him, “If you do not put this referendum on the ballot, we will file a lawsuit.” So that’s exactly what happened.

Now, the election results were bittersweet. We needed 50 percent plus one to pass. We got 49.55 percent, so we failed by 19 votes, but the overwhelming majority of students—over 2,000 people— voted yes in favor of divestment, compared to only 600 saying no.

So this was very exciting, right?

Wrong!

Because right after the results, the student body president ordered an executive memorandum ordering the election rules commissioner to invalidate the results because it was illegal and supposedly confusing. Not only that, but he started a bill, which eventually passed in the student government, giving the supreme court the authority to censor any referendum. And can you guess what students are on the supreme court? All Hillel students.

Not only did he do that, but he sent an e-mail to the entire USF community—46,000 people, students, faculty and staff—telling them, “I apologize for putting the referendum on the ballot. It was

The overwhelming majority of students voted in favor of divestment.

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illegal. We shouldn’t have done that. It was confusing. It will never happen again.”

To get approval to send such an e-mail, he had to get permission from whom? The office of the university president. So this was much bigger than just some student body president. The administration, the lawyers, the assistant dean of students were getting involved in applying pressure.

Now you might be wondering, why is the student body president such a jerk? Why does he say, “Dead on arrival, it won’t be on the ballot?” He sends an e-mail to everyone telling them that we were confusing and we were violating the law. It turns out not only does he attend AIPAC conferences, he leads seminars committing himself to supporting U.S.-Israeli relations. This is a tweet from Brian Goff at AIPAC: “you had me at shalom, #pickupline.” This AIPAC puppet undermined the voices of thousands of students.

So after all of that, we gave up, right?

Wrong! We did not give up. We decided that we were going to create a petition outside of student government so that they couldn’t just invalidate us. We were going to make it the largest petition in the history of any Florida university. We collected 10,000 signatures and we went straight to the USF Foundation—the group that manages the endowment—and we told them: “Here are the signatures. You ignored us last year. We want divestment and we want it now.”

So that’s exactly what happened, right?

Wrong! The USF Foundation in 19 minutes—they only discussed our petition for 19 minutes. I swear to God, I have it on camera. And they rejected our petition.

Why? It turns out the executive director of the Hillel on our campus posted a blog where he brags about having one-on-one meetings with Jewish trustees in order to thwart the efforts of SJP. He also told them that they lied about how many signatures they’ve collected. They’re anti-Semitic and they were bribing students with pizza—10,000 slices of pizza. That’s got to be like $50,000—way over our budget. Not only does he say that, but he says that his students have been working behind the scenes to undermine SJP in student government. This is a statement from the USF Foundation where they say, “We will not politicize our investments. We rejected the petition.”

What message does a university send to its students when they reject a petition from 10,000 of them calling for something?

What message does a university send to its students when the student body president sends an e-mail to 46,000 people saying, the referendum you petitioned for, the referendum you voted for is invalidated, but please don’t forget to vote for your school T-shirt and have your voices heard? What message does a university send to its students when the student newspaper will not cover the largest petition in support of human rights, but will instead

cover a petition to bring Chick-fil-A sauce to our student cafeteria?

I’ll tell you what message they’re sending. They want us to shut up, go to class, pay a lot of money for tuition and for textbooks, don’t talk about human rights, don’t talk about anything else. The only thing you can talk about is T-shirts and Chick-fil-A sauce.

Now, I felt special at the time. I thought, “Oh my God, they’re doing all these terrible things to us.” But it turns out, it was happening all around the nation. It happened at Loyola, when they passed divestment last year and the student body president was pressured into vetoing the resolution. It happens every year in DC, when AIPAC recruits students and indoctrinates them with proIsraeli propaganda by giving them free trips and free boat rides, as seen here in this picture obtained from their website.

It happened at Northwestern, when the Israeli consulate and StandWithUs tried their hardest to thwart their divestment resolution. It happened at Northeastern, when they suspended them. It happened at Loyola, when they gave them sensitivity training. It happened at FAU [Florida Atlantic University], when they gave them sensitivity training—and that is all just suppression by the student government and the university.

What about the demonization of student activists and minorities? This is a quote from an interview that the UCLA director of Hillel gave to a reporter. He said, “Campus politics have been hijacked by a group of students who are intent to conquer the coalition of Arab, Muslim, Latino, Asian and gay students. They’re all oppressed minorities.”

So when AIPAC buys students, when they have one-on-one meetings to undermine the voices of thousands of students, that’s not hijacking—but when minorities get involved, not only are we hijacking, we’re trying to conquer.

This is a screenshot from an event that took place at my university. This woman, Dr. Anat Berko, a so-called terrorism expert, came and told students that jihad is a holy war against the infidel.

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Ahmad Saadaldin: Overcoming Obstacles: SJP Successes

It’s the personal duty of every Muslim to kill a non-Muslim, and if they don’t, they’re a religious hypocrite. If they want paradise, they need to kill a nonbeliever. She’s talking about me. She’s telling my fellow classmates and students that this is what I believe.

A week later, instead of passing out hummus and falafel on culture day, Hillel decided to pass out flyers saying, “Islam will obliterate Israel. Islam must dominate. Islam will kill Jews.”

Now after all this demonization and suppression and rejecting our petition and referendum, we gave up, right?

Wrong!

We came together and we raised the money—paid up out of our own pockets—and we paid for a billboard right outside of our university, so every student who goes to school has to see it. It’s saying, “10,000 students silenced, end USF investments in Israeli Apartheid, USF for human rights.”

Now, what was the reaction? What were Hillel students telling us on Facebook? They accused us of terrorism. Now, we posted that billboard two weeks after the attacks in Paris, when freedom of speech was a huge topic, huge discussion. Our freedom of speech somehow was terrorizing them.

This is another picture that they posted after SJP and MSA [Muslim Students Association] had a vigil for the three Muslim students who were killed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Some of you might have heard about it in the news. Posting a picture where a crusader, obviously referring to the Crusades that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Another person says, “All Muslims don’t belong in America. That’s too bad. I’m glad three are dead because all are terrorists.”

This is an organization called Hamas on Campus. Dima Khalidi referred to them. Their mission is to expose SJP. In one of their videos, you can see they have this crazy web where they connect SJP to the Brotherhood, to Hamas, to all of these different organizations, claiming that our mission is to wipe Israel off the map, and that we’re anti-Semitic, and that we’re violent.

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They include a picture of 9/11, as if somehow SJP is affiliated to that.

You might have seen these. This is from UCLA. They’re passing out fliers affiliating SJP with violence and #jewhaters. They passed it out all around campus, including on the mascot, SJP #JewHaters.

So these are all the obstacles that we have to deal with in the form of suppression and demonization.

What about the success?

Well, I like to think that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and every time they push, we push back harder.

So when they suppress us, when they demonize us, we get better at organizing. We become stronger. We become much more active. We expose them and document their corruption. We increase our pressure on student governments to be more fair and transparent, and students are realizing that if our student government isn’t going to be fair and transparent, then I need to take matters into my own hands. I’m going to run for student body elections. I’m going to get involved, and I’m going to hold them to a higher standard.

And at the end of the day, awareness is key. So when they demonize us, right? Any publicity is good publicity, and I say that because that university student body president, who sent an email to 46,000 people about our referendum, didn’t realize that, while he was trying to demonize us and smear us, only 4,000 people voted on the referendum. He just told 46,000 people about our referendum, and we were getting flooded with e-mails asking, “What is this referendum about? What are they talking about?

Why are they silencing students?”

I’ll give you some examples of success. They’ve ended up passing divestment at Loyola again. This time, the student body president did not veto it.

At ASUC [Associated Students of the University of California], they passed the divestment again. The student body president did not veto it. And at DePaul last year, in one of the biggest victories for divestment, they passed a referendum despite the interference The Israel Lobby Conference

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of pro-Israeli organizations pumping money and resources, trying to smear them and lie about them, and they still passed it.

And you remember our good friends on Facebook who were calling us terrorists for posting billboards? Complete strangers rushed to our defense, accusing them of ignorance and hatred.

One woman told them, “I’m just still confused as to why you chose the word terrorist. Well, I’m not confused. I know why, because they’re a Palestinian-Muslim organization and in your head that equals terrorist. Please take your Wonder Bread elsewhere with your ignorant comments.”

Lastly, I’d like to make the point that one of the biggest successes we have is obviously the growth of divestment, the growth of this

conversation, despite the fact that they’re trying so hard to silence us. So this is a map obtained from a pro-Israel organization. This is their website, where they document SJPs and divestment. So these red dots are places where divestment has successfully passed in the form of a resolution or a referendum. Every time they try and silence us, every time they demonize us, lie about us, every time Israel attacks Gaza, SJP spreads and so does divestment. Every blue dot is a point where an SJP chapter has been formed and where a divestment campaign is taking place. Our message to them is, no matter what you do to silence us, we will never be silent.

Obviously, this entire thing was very emotional for me. I was invested in it. But since then, my friend and I have been producing a documentary, titled “Suppression” in which we are trying to document all of this and tell our story. So if you don’t mind now, I’d like to share with you the trailer for that documentary. Is that something you all would like?

Audience: Yes. Ahmad Saadaldin: All right. Thank you for your time. ■ To view the trailer, visit <https://youtu.be/j5WdVAWIU0M>.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Moderator Helena Cobban: We have time for maybe one question given to each of the panelists. So Dima, if you could choose your question first and answer succinctly and strongly, but mainly shortly, because the next thing is lunch.

Dima Khalidi: The question is, “the only way to win the battle for control over the Palestinian-Israeli narrative on campus is to win over the moderates who are on the fence. How can SJP groups operate effectively and present their message without being labeled as extremists?”

I don’t think I need to speak for the students. Our role at Palestine Legal is not to tell them what to say. Do they seem extremist to you? I don’t think so. This is part of the problem, that students should be able to get their message across and they’re doing it effectively, and that’s the problem. That Israel advocacy groups are seeing that they’re doing it effectively, and that’s where the

repression comes in. I think they are getting moderates, so to speak, off the fence. And that’s why we’re seeing all of this suppression. That would be my answer to that question and I think they speak very well for themselves.

Moderator Helena Cobban: Thanks. Amani, which question are you choosing?

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: This question comes from a student leader in SJP in New York City. It says, “what’s your advice for those of us who are constantly getting ostracized and repressed for being active in the Palestinian Liberation Movement, especially being in a city like New York that has a large demographic of pro-Israelis and Zionists?”

From experience, my biggest piece of advice is to remain consistent and never get disheartened, because there is a reason why it is so stressful being in our position and why we’re facing

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

such strong adversaries. It’s because what we’re saying is threatening. That’s literally all we have. All we have on our side are the facts and the truth. We can go up against rhetoric, against talking points all day every day, but the truth is always going to prevail, and that is terrifying for the status quo. So just remain consistent and never lose hope.

Ahmad Saadaldin: This question says, “why doesn’t SJP work on all campuses to educate student leaders so they don’t have to attend all-expense-paid trips to Washington, DC and attend the AIPAC conference?”

I think that’s something that people are trying to do. To have an SJP at a university, you need people that want to start an SJP, and it’s growing. Eventually it will get there, but I think we’re well behind AIPAC and these other organizations. They have a lot of money and they have been doing this for years. I think we’re making a lot of progress, but we need support from people like you. Thank you very much.

Moderator Helena Cobban: I know that Dima, Amani and Ahmad will be around for you to ask questions, talk with them some more. Again, just one quick plug for Nora Barrows-Friedman’s book about the SJP movement, are you in it, Ahmad? You can learn a lot more about the SJP movement from these wonderful people and more about Palestine Legal. If you just think how much money goes into the discourse suppression organizations that Dima mentioned a little bit, all the panelists mentioned a little bit. Palestine Legal has three attorneys and one administrative person. It’s amazing what the needs are. You can get more information about Palestine Legal outside. You can talk to Dima, obviously. ■

This DVD of the April 10, 2015 conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC provides an unprecedented, frank and long overdue look at the power of the Israel Lobby in the United States. Eighteen speakers address how the Lobby works, its efforts to silence critics and suppress free speech on campus, its impact on Israelis (including Palestinian citizens), its influence over Congress, and its efforts to promote war with Iran. Heralded as “the beginning of the American Spring” by Haaretz columnist and conference speaker Gideon Levy, the Israel Lobby conference is essential viewing for anyone interested in the Israel-Palestine issue or the role of lobbying organizations in American politics.

To order your DVD ($19.95), visit <www.MiddleEastBooks.com> or call (202) 939-6050 for more information.

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PANEL 4: Is the Lobby Good for Israel?

Is the Lobby Good for Israel?

Delinda Hanley

Moderator

PANEL 4

How the Lobby Enables Israeli Policy: Views of an Israeli in America Miko Peled

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oderator Delinda Hanley: I’m Delinda Hanley, news editor and executive director of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, cofounded 33 years ago by Ambassador Andrew Killgore (please stand up) and my father, Richard Curtiss. Our previous panelists talked about the Israel Lobby’s effect on political discourse in the United States. This panel will grapple with the question: “Is the Lobby Good for Israel?”

Miko Peled is an Israeli writer and activist living in the U.S. He was born and raised in Jerusalem.

Driven by a personal family tragedy to explore Palestine, its people and their narrative, he has written a book about his journey called The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. The book describes Peled’s family history since his grandparents immigrated to Palestine in the early 20th century. Miko’s maternal grandfather was a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence; His father, Matti, was a general in the Israeli army.

Check out Miko’s blog, Tear Down the Wall, at <mikopeled.com>.

Miko Peled: Thank you very much. Thank you all for being here. It’s a real honor to speak here and to be on this excellent panel along with Gideon [Levy] and Huwaida [Arraf]. I see that Congressman Paul Findley joined us, and it’s nice to see you, Congressman, once again. Let’s give him a hand. Many friends and other activists and people who are really crucial to the issue of Palestine, and of course the Washington Report, which has been vital in providing information in real time about this issue.

The question that was posed to me was “Is the Lobby Good for Israel?”

I would answer this with an unequivocal “yes.” Those of you who have read their book [The Israel Lobby], Mearsheimer and Walt argue that, ”No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously con-

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Miko Peled: How the Lobby Enables Israeli Policy: Views of an Israeli in America

vincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

They continue to say, “AIPAC’s success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it…AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the myriad pro-Israel PACs. Those seen as hostile to Israel, on the other hand, can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to their opponents....The bottom line is that AIPAC, which is a de facto agent of a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress. Open debate about U.S. policy towards Israel does not occur there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.”

One could end the discussion probably here, with the above statements, on its own, but I think this important issue deserves a lengthier discussion.

AIPAC and the state of Israel, which benefits from AIPAC’s work, owes much of its success to its predecessors—a group of Zionist diplomats who began as early as the turn of the last century, and by the 1920s were traveling extensively around the world, lobbying for the Zionist project and for the funding and implementation of the project—basically the project being the colonization of Palestine by European Jews. Without the huge efforts and diplomatic talent of these people—who included Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Sharett, my own grandfather, Avraham Katznelson, later on Abba Eban and Golda Meir, to name but a few—without these people and their work, Zionism could not have enjoyed the success it had in the years leading to the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel.

The lobbying by the early Zionist diplomats—all of whom were well-spoken, highly educated, completely secular, they were all white Europeans and looked nothing like traditional “Jews” that the world was accustomed to seeing—paved the way to AIPAC and its tentacles here in the U.S. and in other countries in the West, where Zionists needed support.

In order to appreciate AIPAC’s enormous contribution to Israel, I think we need to do two things: We need to understand what the organization is ultimately selling, and understand its strategy.

The key to Israel’s legitimacy is the Zionist narrative, and AIPAC is selling the narrative in order to maintain the legitimacy. The Zionist narrative in this country is not only accepted, it is treated with religious fervor. It is seen as biblical and indisputable. One does not need to convince Americans that Israel is always right

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and that the Zionist narrative is true, because they receive this with their mother’s milk, quite literally.

What is this narrative? It is a mythical story that turned the history of Palestine from 1947 until the present time on its head. The brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the establishment of a racist apartheid state which offers exclusive rights to Jewish people in Palestine was sold here as a story of heroism and revival. Thanks to AIPAC, the horrific brutal destruction of Palestine—from 1947 to the present day—is virtually unknown in this country.

That is in itself an impressive accomplishment, without which Israel could not have survived. And there is no better proof of that success than the reaction here in the U.S. to the 51-day massacre of innocents in Gaza that took place in the summer of 2014.

More than 2,000 people were murdered in cold blood in Gaza on prime time, yet we may safely say that there was a consensus in this country that this massacre was not only acceptable and justifiable, but also necessary as a means of self-defense. To achieve this is nothing short of magic, and AIPAC was able to pull this through.

When Israel, through AIPAC and the countless organizations that work with it and through it, talks about a threat to Israeli security, they mean a threat to the narrative. Since the early 1950s Israel has been claiming that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip pose a threat to its security, indeed to its very existence. The Israeli army has been attacking in Gaza and exacting a heavy toll on civilians in Gaza for nearly seven decades. Yet, surprisingly, there has never been a tank, a fighter jet, or a regular military remotely capable of threatening the state of Israel. Why, then, do we hear so much about a security threat, when now as in the past the Gaza Strip is made up of mostly poor refugees? It is the narrative. The existence of over one million refugees in Gaza, the majority of whom are under 18 years of age, is a threat to the narrative, and therefore a threat to the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

And therein lies the threat to Israeli existence.

AIPAC has been able to successfully sell the myth of the existential threat to the American public. We constantly hear about the threats to Israeli existence, though clearly there has never been one.

The threat of Gaza, the threat of Palestinians everywhere, the threat of Iraq, the threat of Iran and the threat of SJP, as we heard earlier, were all fabricated in order to allow Israel to maintain its brutal hold on Palestine and its people and to receive foreign aid—though clearly, as a developed state, it does not need it, and should not qualify for it.

The key to Israel’s legitimacy is the Zionist narrative, and AIPAC is selling the narrative in order to maintain the legitimacy.

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(L-r) Huwaida Arraf, Gideon Levy, Miko Peled and Delinda Hanley.

The myth of Israel as a democracy has no factual basis, yet it, too, has become an indisputable fact. Israel has from the very beginning defined itself as a racist apartheid state that prefers Jews. No attempt has been made to hide this fact, and for almost seven decades Israeli lawmakers have made it their business to develop the state for the Jewish population at the expense of the Palestinian population, be they citizens, residents or simply people living without any legal definition at all. Palestinians have been pushed out of every aspect of the life of the state from the very beginning, not to mention the fact that they were pushed out of the country and not allowed to return. The web of laws that govern the lives of Palestinians, whether they live in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, the Naqab desert, Ramallah, Jenin or Khan Younis, is too complicated to even attempt to understand, yet regardless of where in Palestine Palestinians reside, they are governed by the state of Israel under laws that are vastly different than the ones that govern the lives of Jewish Israelis.

And still, we hear that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which took place in June of 1967, is sold as though it was the result of an inevitable war, a response to an existential threat at the end of which Israelis prevailed, and the “territories” are the “spoils of war.” But in fact, the conquest of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was the final stage of the occupation of Palestine, and all were planned far in advance. The war of 1967 concluded the occupation of Palestine and the creation of a single state over all of Palestine, with exclusive rights for Jewish people. What is Jewish about this, as Alice Rothchild asked earlier, I don’t know. Most Jewish people do not live and have never lived there, and today, the majority of those who live there are not Jewish, and Israel certainly does not espouse any Jewish values. Yet, we hear that Israel is the Jewish State.

None of this could have been achieved without a strong and influential lobby.

AIPAC is engaged in “convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

As I mentioned earlier, there is no need to convince Americans that Israel is right because, as I said earlier, they receive it with their mother’s milk. So much so, that in cases where the interests of the two countries collide, the demand is always for the U.S. to adjust its policy so as to align with Israeli interests, and not the other way around. And we saw an example of this recently about a month ago, with Netanyahu’s very successful campaign stop here at the Capitol and with the Iran issue.

One has to wonder: how is it that a false history is kept alive in the face of clear evidence to it’s being untrue?

You can imagine my surprise when I looked at my son’s high school history book—my boys went to school in San Diego—AP history book, and found that the entire chapter regarding the ancient Hebrews is taken from the Old Testament. My first reaction was to make sure I was looking at an actual history book. My second reaction was to check the beginning of the book and see if they were also teaching creationism—because they may as well have been. In a country where there is a serious debate over whether creationism should be taught in school or evolution, the Zionist narrative, which claims its roots in biblical stories of the ancient Hebrews, is taught as history, although little to no historical proof exists to substantiate it.

This sort of influence can only be achieved through years and years of hard work—an effort to instill the narrative as a value and not just as an historical episode. This can only be done, again, by a lobby that knows how to influence a society.

Along this vein, AIPAC and the other Zionist groups, all of whom are in the business of selling the Zionist narrative, engage in community development and service activities that root them well in communities across the country. Validation and acceptance of the Zionist narrative are an integral part of almost all of these efforts, as well as the delegitimization of any Palestinian claims to a legitimate narrative which contradicts the Zionist story. The Zionist narrative is a value that goes hand in hand with democracy, freedom and tolerance, while the Palestinian narrative is associated with lies, hatred, violence and bigotry.

Today we see serious cracks in the wall that AIPAC was able

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to build around the issue of Palestine. It has been severely weakened due to the diligence and tremendous work being done, like we heard earlier, on campuses by Students for Justice in Palestine. For the first time we see a change in the conversation on Palestine, and the level of the debate on the issue has been elevated, again thanks to SJP. So it would seem that the big bad lobby, AIPAC, has finally met its match with Students for Justice in Palestine on campuses.

Still, we see tolerance workshops and initiatives to weed out racism and anti-Semitism, and this was done recently at UCLA, where one of my sons is a junior. These take place in schools and universities all across the U.S. Within these seemingly benign and positive initiatives, the Zionist narrative and the delegitimization of Palestinians are pursued with vigilance.

The persecution of Palestinians in the U.S., which is a crucial element in the survival of the Zionist narrative and the legitimacy of Israel, is also the work of a well-oiled lobby. I think nothing demonstrates this better than the closure, prosecution, trial and convictions of the Holy Land Foundation and the five men who operated it. This could not have been achieved without tremendous behind-thescenes work and years of preparation. It was one of [the] clearest cases of injustice in the history of the American judicial system, and it has the Israeli Lobby fingerprints all over it. The Holy Land Foundation did not engage in terrorist activities, nor did they fund or support terrorism in any way. This was made absolutely clear in their trials. Yet five men were convicted and are currently serving prison

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sentences of 20 to 65 years in maximum-security jails.

Why was this necessary? Because a respected, successful and honest Muslim Palestinian charity is a threat to the narrative and to the legitimacy of the state of Israel. So the Holy Land Foundation, its operators, its major contributors, and an entire community had to be taken down, and though it took almost two decades and two trials, this mission was accomplished.

AIPAC’s success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it.

It starts, in fact, at a much lower level. Members of small and seemingly insignificant city councils, as well as large ones, are invited to junkets to see Israel. Connections to AIPAC are developed very early in a politician’s career, so that every aspiring politician in the U.S. understands that supporting Israel—even if means turning a blind eye to terrible crimes, even if it means giving Netanyahu, who stands at the head of a racist, brutal regime and who oversaw the cold-blooded murder of thousands of civilians in Gaza just a few months ago—again, even if it means receiving him with a standing ovation, it is necessary for success in American politics.

Maintaining Israeli legitimacy and keeping the narrative alive is the key. It is the most important strategic objective for Israel, and therefore it is so for AIPAC. We can clearly say that AIPAC is and always has been not only good, but crucial to the existence of the state of Israel.

Thank you very much. ■

Does Unconditional Support for Israel Endanger Israeli Voices?

Gideon Levy

Moderator Delinda Hanley: Gideon Levy is going to talk about unconditional support for Israel. Does it endanger Israeli voices?

As we all know, Gideon Levy is a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz and a member of its editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982 and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor.

He is the author of the weekly “Twilight Zone” feature, which covers the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 25 years, as well as the writer of political editorials for the newspaper. Our Washington Report readers love it when we reprint his powerful columns in our pages. Thank you.

Gideon Levy: Thank you very much. I think that Miko [Peled]

left me two spare minutes so I’ll be longer. Thank you very much for having me here today. Never was I so convinced that Israel and the United States are really sharing the same values after listening to all those fascinating presentations today, because by the end of the day, we are dealing with two regimes which are very, very similar. With two regimes that have very little to do with democracy, and I will get to it.

I was born in Tel Aviv. I was brought up in Tel Aviv. I was a very good boy in Tel Aviv. I served in the Israeli army. I did something which is even much worse than this. I worked for four years with Shimon Peres, then-leader of Israeli opposition, in the late ’70s, The Israel Lobby Conference

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early ’80s before most of you were born. And it was only by the late ’80s, when I started to travel to the occupied territories quite accidentally…as a journalist, when I realized that the biggest drama of Israel is taking place half an hour away from our homes, in our dark backyard. That this real drama of Israel has almost no one to be interested in, that it is hidden in the backyard of Israel, half an hour away from our homes. All those crimes are taking place and we Israelis—most of us, if not all of us—do not want to know, do not know and above all, do not care.

And it took me many, many years to understand how come that the society—some of you met Israelis, they’re not monsters. Every catastrophe in the world, the Israelis are always the first one to send rescue teams with field hospitals. Many Israelis would help any old lady to cross the road many times, even if she doesn’t want to cross the road. People with values. How come that this society lives for so many years with this drama in its backyard and feels so good about itself and has so little moral doubt, if at all?

How is it possible? How is it possible that most of the Israelis—not all of them—are deeply convinced that the IDF is the most moral army in the world? Try to tell an Israeli, and I tried it once or twice: You know what? Maybe it’s the second moral army in the world.

Maybe the army of Luxembourg is more moral, I don’t know if Luxembourg has an army at all. They will be deeply offended, how can you dare? How come that when this reality is taking place so close to our homes not over the oceans but just half an hour away from our homes, how come that we live in peace with it? That we continue with it, that there is no resistance, almost nothing? And here, I want to object to what my friend Miko [Peled] said.

When I got first the invitation to come here, the first words were “Israel Lobby,” I said, “Wow, they invited me. AIPAC has invited me.” And then I said, “That’s the chance of my life. And I’m going to come there to Washington and to tell them, ‘Listen, with friends like yours, Israel does not need enemies.’” But unfortunately…but then I continue to read and I read that I’m privileged to be invited to another forum, not exactly AIPAC, and even not the AntiDefamation League, but I can say from here, Miko [Peled], I think that we are dealing with a corrupting friendship. I think that if it weren’t for the Israel Lobby, Israel would have been today a better place to live in. Israel would have been a more just place.

And I think that if it weren’t for the Israel Lobby, the United States would have been a better place and a more democratic place. But it’s not for me to judge the American politics. And still

by the end of the day, we are dealing with an enigma, because nothing can really explain it. Nothing can explain how administration after administration, legislators after legislators, are going in the very same way which contradicts American interests in so many cases, which contradicts international law, human rights, moral values, you name it.

Can it be only this small group, as powerful as it is? Is it the full explanation? I doubt it, but that’s for you to decide not, for us in Israel. But for us is Israel—or at least for me—it is very clear. Think about a relative of yours or a friend of yours who is, God forbid, a drug addict. There are two ways to deal with him. One is to supply him with money, and he will go and buy more drugs. He will be very grateful to you.

He will appreciate you. He will tell you, you love me. You are my friend. You are my best friend. The other way is to send him to a rehabilitation center. He will be so mad at you. But what is real care, and what is real love, and what is real friendship? And does anyone in this hall have the slightest doubt that Israel is occupation-addicted?

Therefore, for me, this conference here is so crucial and so important. Because we have to face reality, and reality is that there is no chance for a change from within the Israeli society—no way.

I’ll try to explain why. But if this is the case, the only hope is for an international intervention, and the only hope is from this place, from Washington, from the United States, from the EU, only from there. Because the Israeli society is by far today too brainwashed; life in Israel is by far too good. And Israel, let’s face it, is a society which lives in denial, totally disconnected with reality. Would it be a private person, I would recommend either medications or hospitalization, because people who lose connection with reality might be very dangerous either to themselves or to society.

And the Israeli society lost connection with reality. It lost connection with the reality in its backyard. It totally lost connection with the international environment. Really to believe that 5 million Jews know better than 6 billion people of the world? Really believe that 5 million Jews will be able to continue to live on their sword forever? Is there one example in history in which any country lived on its sword forever—empires? Really believing that in the 21st century it is acceptable to ignore the international law in such a way as to ignore the international institutions and to rely only on the United States and Micronesia—let’s not forget this friend of Israel—and recently also, Czech Republic. Thank you, Czech Republic and Canada, your neighbor, obviously.

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Does it work? Has it ever worked? So therefore, it is so crucial for people like me to see any kind of change here in the United States, and we jump on any sign. When J Street was established we said, “Yay, here it comes.” And it didn’t come. When Obama was elected, I had tears in my eyes. I said, “Here it comes.” And it didn’t come.

And when I see conferences like this here today, again, it gives me some hope that change might happen, because change will have to take place here. In Israel it’s a lost case—forget about it.

The Israeli society has surrounded itself with shields, with walls, not only physical walls but also mental walls. I don’t want to get into it because it’s another lecture. But I’ll just give the three principles which enable us Israelis to live so easily with this brutal reality. A) Most of the Israelis, if not all of them, deeply believe that we are the chosen people. And if we are the chosen people, we have the right to do whatever we want. B) There were more brutal occupations in history.

There were even longer occupations in history, even though the Israeli occupation gets to quite a nice record. But there was never in history an occupation in which the occupier presented himself as the victim— not only the victim, but the only victim around. This also enables any Israeli to live in peace, because we are the victims.

In the other panel, Professor Falk spoke about the dual strategy of Israel, of being a victim on one hand and manipulating on the other hand, after what happened in Paris and in Copenhagen with the terror attacks. Binyamin Netanyahu came [up] with the notion, “All the Jews must come to Israel. It’s the safest place for the Jews in the world. It’s a shelter for the Jews in the world.” Which is wrong because Israel today is the most dangerous place on earth for Jews. But let’s put it aside. It was only 24 hours later when he said Israel is in existential threat under the Iranian bomb. And I asked myself, how can you dare call Jews to come and to join this suicidal project, when the Iranians are going to bomb us?

But in Israel anything goes, and both declarations were accepted as the only truth. And here, I get to the third set of values that enable us Israelis to live in peace with the occupation. This is maybe the most crucial one and the worst one. We say victimization, we say chosen people. When I say victimization, it goes without saying, we have to mention the Holocaust and the unforgettable Mrs. Golda Meir that the American Jewry had exported to Israel. She said once—this unforgettable woman—that after the Holocaust the Jews have the right to do whatever they want.

But the third set of values is the most dangerous one. This is the systematic de-humanization of the Palestinians, which enables us

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Israelis to live in peace with everything because if they are not human beings like us, then there is not really a question of human rights.

And if you scratch under the skin of almost every Israeli, you will find it there. Almost no one will treat the Palestinians as equal human beings like us. I once wrote that we treat the Palestinians like animals. I got so many protest letters from animal rights organizations—rightly so. But by the end of the day, how many Israelis did ever try for a moment to put themselves in the place of the Palestinians for a moment, for one day? And I want to give you two examples, which will demonstrate it.

Many years ago, I interviewed then-candidate for Prime Minister Ehud Barak. I asked him a question which I try to ask on any occasion, “Mr. Barak, what would have happened if you would have been born Palestinian?” And Barak gave me then the only honest answer he could give me. He said, “I would have joined a terror organization.”

What else would he have done?

Would he become a poet? He doesn’t know how to write poems. Would he become a pianist? He’s quite a bad pianist, and I doubt if he would have become a collaborator, because he is a fighter. And it became a scandal, because how can you dare to put Ehud Barak to think what would have happened if he would have become a Palestinian?

And the second incident briefly, during the second intifada, the city of Jenin, the most closed city in the West Bank, real total siege. I go out from Jenin. I come to the checkpoint. A Palestinian ambulance is parking there with the red lights. I stand after him, no cars can get out of Jenin in those days; no cars can get in. And I wait. The soldiers start playing backgammon in the tent. Usually, I know myself, it’s better that I don’t get into confrontations with the soldiers, because it always ends up very badly. So I stayed in the car. But after 40 minutes, I couldn’t take it.

I went out from the car. I went first to the Palestinian ambulance driver. I asked him, what’s going on? He told me that’s the routine, they let me wait one hour until they come and check the ambulance.

And I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to the soldiers. It became a confrontation but the question that I asked them which really brought them to direct their weapons toward me was one: what would happen if your father was lying in this ambulance? This freaked them out. They lost control. How can I dare to compare between their father and the Palestinian in the ambulance? This set of beliefs, that they are not human beings like us, enable us Israelis to live in so much peace with those crimes, ongoing crimes for so many years, without losing any kind of humanity, values I heard today.

If it weren’t for the Israel Lobby, Israel would have been today a better place to live in.

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People talk about Jewish values. I must be frank with you, I don’t know what are Jewish values. I know what are universal values. Let’s not get into it, really. There are very clear universal values. And there is a very, very clear international law, but for most of the Israelis international is very important, but not for Israel. Israel is a special case. Why is it a special case? Again, you get with all those set of values, with this living in denial.

Here, I want to get back to the topic of our panel, Is it good for Israel? No, it’s very corrupting, because as long as the United States enables Israel to continue—obviously the Palestinians are the first and direct, unbelievable victims of it—but by the end of the day, what will Israel be after all those years? What is it already today? Where does it direct to? Things are getting worse and worse, and therefore I have so little hope about change from within the Israeli society, because things, as you might know, are going more and more to the nationalistic, militaristic, religious direction, with very little hope that change will come from within.

Why would the Israelis go for a change? What incentive? Why would they bother? Life is so good. You should have seen Israel [during] the days when Gaza was bombed, when the beaches were crowded, the helicopters were passing on the way to bomb Gaza, the Israeli TV hardly showed photos from there. Newspa-

pers hardly wrote anything. I wrote one article about the responsibility of the pilots and I needed to use bodyguards to get out of my home after this. The problem, by the way, was that the bodyguards were settlers. They argued with me all day long, until I saw that I was much more secure without the bodyguards rather than with them.

This will be my final remark. The last war in Gaza taught us also that Israel has three regimes today. Maybe the only country and only state in the world with three regimes: one for the Jews, one for the Arab citizens, and one an apartheid regime in the West Bank and Gaza, one of the most brutal and cruel tyrannies in the world. But even for the façade, even for this democracy which I always thought is democracy for its Jewish citizens, I realized last summer that it is a democracy for its Jewish citizens, but only if they think like the majority.

Therefore, and with this I want to conclude, I want to tell you all that a few of us, very few, much too few, but a few of us, are looking to the West, Europe and the United States with a great hope, because we lost hope in Israel. Thank you very much.

Moderator Delinda Hanley: Well, now, I’m afraid we’re going to need a bodyguard to help you in Washington, DC. Thank you very much for your remarks. ■

The Situation of Arab Citizens of Israel: Views of a Palestinian Citizen of Israel Huwaida Arraf

Moderator Delinda Hanley: And I hear Huwaida, or her entourage [children]. Huwaida Arraf is going to talk about the situation of Arab citizens of Israel. Huwaida is a Palestinian American lawyer and human rights advocate. And as the daughter of an Israeli-born Palestinian, she is also a citizen of Israel. In 2001 Arraf co-founded the International Solidarity Movement, which has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was one of the organizers of a delegation of American lawyers to Gaza in February 2009, and she co-authored the report on their findings. She is the former chairperson of the Free Gaza Movement, and led five successful sea voyages to the Gaza Strip to challenge Israel’s illegal blockade. She was one of the primary organizers of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, too. Please welcome Huwaida. Please write down some questions for the speakers.

You don’t have many opportunities to ask these questions.

Huwaida Arraf: Good afternoon. I’m honored to be with you

today and especially on such a distinguished panel. I was asked to speak about the situation of—well, actually the title of the talk was, “The Situation of Arab Citizens of Israel.” In order to give you that view, I think I need to start off by saying that I don’t use that term, Arab citizen of Israel or Arab Israeli or Israeli Arab. I use the term, Palestinian citizen of Israel, not even Palestinian Israeli.

And this is not to negate my Arabness at all. Palestinians and Palestine is a very proud part of the Arab world. But it is because it is an assertion of my national identity, and a national identity that Israel has been trying to eradicate systematically for decades. And for a while, Palestinians inside Israel actually went along with it.

After 1948 the thought was, we will try to assimilate as best as possible, keep our heads down, but that is no longer. I should note when saying that identifying myself as a Palestinian citizen of Israel is a way of asserting national identity, you might ask, well, what about Israeli nationality?

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Actually, the Israeli Supreme Court— I don’t know if many of you know— ruled that Israeli is not a national identity, because Israel considers itself the state of the Jewish people instead of being the state of its citizens. This allows for the systematic discrimination of anybody that is not Jewish. The previous panelists talked a lot about this, so I won’t go into it as much, except to tell you some personal experiences.

Before that, I need to also assert that Palestinians inside Israel, as you all probably know, we are the remnants of the Palestinian people who survived the ethnic cleansing of 1948. And after that, after most Palestinian Christians and Muslims were kicked out of Palestine or killed—we did not relinquish our national identity—Israel changed our political status against our will and made us a minority in our own country. And that is how we remain.

People inside continue to fight for basic rights up against this institution that defines itself as existing for the Jewish people; therefore, no matter what in that political system, we cannot be equals.

I am also an American citizen, and it pains me or annoys me to no end to repeatedly hear about how we Americans and Israelis share the same values. Now since Israel’s last election, we heard the White House actually express its “deep concern” over the video that surfaced of Netanyahu talking about or fear mongering about how the Arabs are coming out to vote in droves.

And while that was a positive recognition and a first step, it did not go far enough, and it was also couched in quite problematic language. Because in an interview, Obama said “although Israel was founded based on this historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly.” And there could be nothing further from the truth, because since 1948 we have been discriminated against in all facets of life.

People tell me—but you are a citizen, and you can vote, and you can travel freely. Yes, I’m a citizen, and yes, I can vote, and yes, I can leave from Ben-Gurion airport, whereas Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot do that. Some of us, though, a lot of us, have to go through extra Israeli security because we stand up to or oppose Israel’s policies. And so while I can travel through BenGurion airport, I am always pulled aside and it takes quite a long time ’til they search every nook and cranny of everything that I’m carrying and everything that is on me. Whereas Jewish Israelis or Jews coming from anywhere in the world don’t have to go through that.

But also the little things—I think not so little—but things that you might not hear about. My grandfather passed away fighting

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to keep his land. We come from a small village in the Galilee, a village that is now about half its size. My grandfather was the largest landowner in that village. Israel kept taking part of that land to build what they called moshavim-like settlements inside Israel for immigrants that they pulled over from abroad in order to increase the number of Jews inside the country.

When I was younger, because I was born in the United States and my parents years ago (and I won’t say how many so as to not let you know how old I am), but many years ago, my parents left when my mother was eight months pregnant with me because they wanted to raise up or to start their family in the United States, where they wouldn’t live under occupation in Beit Sahour—which is where my mom is from, it’s a West Bank town near Bethlehem—or live as a discriminated-against minority inside Israel. And so I was born and raised here. But, as Delinda said, because my father is an Israeli citizen, he was able to give me citizenship, and therefore I am also an Israeli citizen.

Now, when I was younger, we could go back and forth and my father tried to take us all the time—almost every summer—so we could maintain a connection with our land and with our family there.

In 1986, that was the last time we went as a family. Because by that time, I was old enough to be cognizant of the discrimination that we were treated with, the humiliation that we were forced to endure as we were separated and strip-searched. Even as children when we were traveling, I was the oldest of four kids at that time, and even as young kids we were strip-searched. We were held for so long that the plane took off without us. This is when we were searched actually in Amsterdam—as Israeli security was in Amsterdam—on the way to Israel, and the same thing leaving. So my father decided that he wasn’t going to go back again with us as a family.

In 2000, his siblings were telling him that, you know, your father is getting sick and he’s dying, you should come see him. He wouldn’t go. And the next time that he went was to attend his father’s funeral. And I think that that’s a mild case, because things are so much worse in many other instances where families are completely separated from each other. Where Jews anywhere have a right to come and get almost automatic citizenship in Israel, but Palestinians who were made refugees cannot be reunited with their families that remained and that are now citizens of Israel.

Maybe you know about the citizenship and nationality law that was passed in 2003. So a Palestinian citizen who marries a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza cannot bring that spouse to live with him or her inside Israel; and therefore, you have also dividing families.

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PANEL 4: Is the Lobby Good for Israel?

Also a citizen cannot bring his or her kids, if they are over a certain age, to live with him or her inside Israel, again tearing families apart.

Little things—like my sister decided in 2000, she married a Palestinian from our village. She decided that she wanted to live there. She was going to bring her stuff over. She shipped her car from the United States. There is a law on the books that the Israelis allow for citizens returning. They allow all these exemptions and all these perks because they want mainly Jews to come back. So she was supposed to be exempted according to this law from having to pay a tax on her car. Her car was worth $12,000. They wanted to charge her $17,000 tax on the car. But she said, look, I’m qualified for this exemption. I’m a citizen who is returning to the country. And for over a month [she went from] office to office, lawyer after lawyer as her car was being held, and in the end someone told her, but this doesn’t apply to you because you’re not Jewish.

So the laws on the books don’t actually—there are about 50 laws right now that discriminate against the Palestinian citizens of Israel, but they don’t actually say that they discriminate against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is just how it is applied. It’s generally couched in more generic terms. For example, there are over 700 community councils that get to decide what people come and live in their communities. This is a de facto green light for these councils to say that Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, do not fit the bill to live in our community. But it doesn’t say that, you know, this is what these councils are for, but that’s what they are for.

I don’t want to take up too much time, but I want to—one thing also I wanted to mention is, when some of us, I said at the beginning that we became more cognizant of the fact that we are connected to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in the West Bank and Gaza; we are one people. It is only by Israel’s systematic policies that try to paint us as another and divide us not only physically but also psychologically.

Those of us who have been trying to break that have been targeted in various ways. The Knesset, the Israeli political body, is considering over and over again specific laws that would label citizens as terrorist supporters or terrorists as a way to strip them of citizenship or prosecute them or worse.

We have in exile, also a prominent political leader, Azmi Bishara, who the Israelis went after as possibly being a traitor.

Ameer Makhoul, who’s sitting in jail, also he’s a Palestinian political leader from inside Israel, for the same reason. And myself I’ve been active mainly in the West Bank and Gaza for a long time. But when we were considering those first boats to Gaza, although I

very much wanted to be on them, it was a decision that was not easy to make, because would Israel then paint me as a terrorist supporter because I was going to be on my way to Gaza?

But I ended up being on that boat and we got our boats into Gaza. And when I got a few seconds to speak to the Gaza people, the thousands and thousands who came to welcome us, what did I say? I said that, “I’m a Palestinian born in the United States. My mother is from the West Bank; my father is from inside Israel. I live in Ramallah. I work in Jerusalem and I’ve come home to Gaza.

Because we are one people, we will not be divided.”

I have my daughter here with me. Well, because my husband [Adam Shapiro] is busy with my son, but also because I wanted to tell you briefly about their situation. They are also citizens of Israel. Now, I could not pass my citizenship on to them unless they were born in Israel. Again, this is another law that is not specifically meant to just say–— it doesn’t say it discriminates against Palestinians specifically.

But when applied, yes. If I had my son or my daughter here [in the United States], I could not pass my Israeli citizenship on to them.

An Israeli Jew might not be able to either, but an Israeli Jew can always go and claim automatic citizenship to Israel. My kids would not be able to. So if I had them here [in the U.S.] surrounded by my family and my husband, who was not allowed to be with me because Israel bans him from entering, if I had them here, then in the future Israel could say that they cannot come in and they cannot know their land or their family. So my husband and I made that decision a couple of years ago that I would—we traveled together actually and he was arrested—here is my husband. He was arrested by the Israeli authorities. He sat in jail, we tried to challenge it, but in the end it didn’t work. I was nine months pregnant, they deported him and he only got to see his son [Diyaar] the first few weeks via Skype. The same thing with our daughter Mayaar, but we guarantee that they at least now have this Israeli citizenship so that in the future, hopefully, you know, Israel will not be able to deny them access to their homeland.

To the question whether the Israeli Lobby is good for Israel, I think I agree with Gideon Levy in the sense that, if we’re talking about in Israel or whatever you want to call it, really, but if we’re talking about the well-being of a society, the future of kids in that society to be able to live free, not discriminated against, and to thrive in that fashion, then what the Israel Lobby is doing is completely antithetical to that. I don’t want my kids to grow up [there], even though they can have access to the country, but feeling as a discriminated-against minority or even worse.

I could not pass my citizenship on to my children un less they were born in Israel.

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

And so I’m working here hopefully with all of you. Why this conference is so important is that, we build the alternative lobby. Yes, we hear about how powerful AIPAC is, but that’s only because we have not yet stepped up to the plate. Because look at all of us. We are here today and so many more who aren’t here today that think the way we do that that place—Israel, Palestine, whatever you want to call it—should not be a place of racism and discrimination and apartheid and killing. It needs to be something better for all of the kids of that region, no matter what race, religion or ethnicity.

And to do that, we raise our voices. So if the Israeli Lobby is going to continue doing what it’s doing, then we raise our voices even louder. We join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. That is putting pressure on Israel, and I think the stranglehold that the Israeli Lobby has on the United States is breaking. I bring my kids to these conferences in the hopes that in the future I can just show them a picture, because what we are fighting for, the reality that we live today, won’t be a reality when they are old enough to understand. ■

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Moderator Delinda Hanley: We have a lot of questions, and I’ve put piles in front of each speaker. I must say, when I first heard Huwaida speak, maybe a decade or two ago, and I don’t want to age you, but I said you were the next Hanan Ashrawi. But I never saw Hanan Ashrawi give a speech with a baby on her hip. I am very impressed. Would you like to start with your questions?

Miko Peled: Well, it seems that I’m a minority voice here on this panel, which is not always a bad thing. I think that the reason that AIPAC is good for Israel is because [without it] Israel could not have gotten away with being Israel. There could not have been this brutal apartheid regime in Palestine had it not been for AIPAC. The brutal apartheid regime is what Israel is. There is no other form of Israel. There is no possibility for any other type of an Israel.

This kind of leads into the first question here that I have, a comment regarding something that—I guess, the two questions are pretty much complementary. This is regarding to a comment that my father made in a speech in San Francisco in 1992, when he was still alive saying, very similar to what Gideon [Levy] was saying, that AIPAC, or the American blind support and financial aid to Israel, is corrupting Israel because free money corrupts.

I don’t think that is what corrupted Israel. Israel was corrupt from the beginning. Israel was created as a result of a brutal ethnic cleansing, and established itself as an apartheid regime immediately when it was formed. There was no better Israel. There was no uncorrupt Israel. There cannot be an uncorrupt Israel, because it was built on a crime and it has no legitimacy. The possibility that something else corrupted it and that perhaps it could have been better without this, I don’t think that’s a possibility.

AIPAC is the enabler, absolutely. AIPAC is the enabler or maybe one of the enablers. But I don’t think that the financial supporters were corrupt. It feeds the corruption, but it was built on, like I said, a terrible crime of ethnic cleansing and brutality which goes on to this day, perhaps even worse than it was.

The second question, I’ll just kind of connect. I’ll connect the two,

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which is this whole idea that we could have an Israel next to a Palestinian state living in peace. You cannot have an Israel next to a Palestinian state because Israel is a racist colonial state that is built on a racist colonialist ideology, which cannot be reined in. There cannot be an Israel and the reality where there is some other rights for Palestinians within it. There can only be a state that affords rights to all of its citizens regardless of whether they’re Israeli or Palestinian, or an Israel which is a racist regime. These are the two options. An option where we have two states—one Palestinian, one Israeli—is impossible. It’s science fiction because you cannot rein in a racist colonialist regime. That’s why it hasn’t happened to this day.

That kind of ties in, I think, with both of these questions. That’s why a single democracy or a transforming of Israel from what it is today, the so-called Jewish state, into a democracy with equal rights is really the only solution if we’re seeking justice and peace, and if we want Huwaida [Arraf] and her children to have the same rights as my children, who were also born here in the United States and have a completely different status when we go to visit Palestine. That’s it. Thank you.

Gideon Levy: Can I get one hour, because I have—I will not be able to answer all the questions. I’ll be happy to answer them privately later, because this will really take so long.

Let’s call it from now on the United States of Israel, because many times when someone looks at the relations between Israel and the United States, one might ask, who is really the superpower between the two? Those questions become much more valid in the recent days when you see what’s going on with Iran. Really, I’m not in a position to tell Americans what to feel. But would I be an American—like I asked Ehud Barak, will you be a Palestinian— would I be an American, I would really be embarrassed.

When you see a title in Haaretz, in my newspaper, which says two days ago, “Israel to Pressure Congress to Thwart Iranian Nuclear Deal,” and then an Israeli official says to Haaretz that Israel will lobby the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 4: Is the Lobby Good for Israel?

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make it difficult or even impossible to approve a comprehensive deal with Iran. Can you imagine yourself if it would be the opposite, if someone would have written that the Americans are trying to act in the Israeli parliament to change its decisions? We are dealing now, really, with almost questions of sovereignty. We are dealing with—really, needless to say that there’s no state in the world would have dared to do it and no statesman in the world. I must tell you frankly, it’s not Israel’s fault. Israel is doing whatever it can. It’s the one who enables it.

Now there were some questions about Haaretz and about myself.

This is always easier to answer. Haaretz lost like one million shekels, which is around $300,000, only for my article about the pilots, in terms of canceling subscribers. Still Haaretz supports me and I gained full freedom. ˆ found a way to survive even in those bad days. We have a paywall as part of, you know, it’s a great success story relatively. We are struggling like any printed newspaper in the world, except for India. Or in other parts of the world, the printed newspapers are struggling. But for the shortcoming time, as far as I know, we will be there if the Israelis will want it or not. We will be there, and I’ll be there as much as I can.

Why was Netanyahu reelected? How come that Netan yahu was re-elected? The $1 million question! That exactly shows what I tried to say, where Israel is going. Netanyahu is an artist of spreading fears. He reminds me of this child in the Charlie Chaplin movie who went and threw stones at windows of shops, and then came to his father to fix those windows. Netanyahu threw the stones and then he calls his father, which is himself, to fix it. He spread all those fears, not only [about] Iran. Not only that all the Palestinians want just one thing—to throw us to the ocean. Even swine flu can become an existential threat in Israel for a few days. He spread all those fears, and then he presented himself as the one and only one who can save Israel from those terrible threats. It’s a very well-known method to survive politically. These men never suggested one single hope for Israel. One single hope. Now, politicians who build their career on hopes, many times false hopes, he went in a different way.

I was last week in Canada. There was a twin to Netanyahu in Canada—Mr. Harper also. I thought when I was in Canada, I felt so much at home. They have this obsession now with ISIS that in a certain stage, I told my partner, “Let’s not go out from the hotel, because they are everywhere here.” [Stephen] Harper is elected again and again. I never met a Harper supporter. I never met a Netanyahu supporter. But by the end of the day, they are re-

elected, and that’s the secret, I guess.

I’ll try one more question. What pressure do you face to stop you from your writing? This must be very clear. I get a lot of hate mails, and I really know the story. But until now, at least, I gained freedom in terms of my newspaper and also, one must say, in terms of the government, it is not to be taken for granted. In the last war in Gaza, there was one very serious politician from the Likud Party who called to bring me to court for treason. Treason in war, by the way, in Israel might be death penalty, which was never implemented, obviously. But those voices become stronger and stronger. But until now, the only pressure I really face is those unpleasant things from the street, from the Jewish community.

The other day someone wrote me, “Thank you for a wonderful article—Adolf Hitler,” and things like this. Very tasteful. I passed a long time ago the wishes for my death. Now, it’s cancer to my children and this kind of things.

It’s not very pleasant, but it’s really not the issue.

The issue is where does this place go to —the Israeli society.

The best thing, when we try to confront those right-wingers, those Zionists, those mainstream in Israel, the best thing is not to argue with them. The best thing is only to ask, where do you go to? What is your plan? There are no Palestinians. Nothing. It’s only Israel, the chosen people. Everything. Where do you direct? What will it be in 10 years’ time? In 20 years’ time? Do you really believe that this will be possible forever? There will be no answer.

My last remark, what you just mentioned, Miko [Peled], we can do a whole lecture out of it. Me, like you, I truly believe that the two-state solution is dead. I think that this train left the station. I deeply regret it, but it left the station. I think that all of those who speak now about the two-state solution, do so deliberately only to gain more time in order to base the occupation even deeper and deeper. Thank you.

Huwaida Arraf: Okay. I had a couple of comments. It’s very true. This one says, “Please, when talking about Arab Palestinians, please include Druze too. It’s not only Muslims and Christians.”

That is very true. I said Christians and Muslims. I did not mean to exclude…Druze, Bedouins, all Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel.

There is another question along that line that said, “In regard to Muslim and Arab Israeli citizens or Palestinian citizens of Israel, would a Druze experience the same discrimination? Does the Israeli government discriminate among the Arabs living inside Israel, such as Druze, Christians and Muslims? Or, are they treated equally?” I don’t have any hard facts about this or statis-

I truly believe that the twostate solution is dead.

I think that this train has left the station.

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By the end of the day, we are dealing with the third generation under the occupation.

tics. It showed, for the most part, they’re treated equally. They’re not Jewish. Of course, the Druze community, as most probably know, serve in the Israeli military. Therefore they are eligible for some things, some perks that come along with serving in the Israeli military that those who don’t serve in the Israeli military aren’t eligible for.

Also within the Druze community, it’s not a hundred percent. It is split probably around 50/50 in terms of those who serve and those who don’t. There’s an internal debate within the Druze community. I know I have a relative who is Druze, who refused to serve in the Israeli military. He was going to be a doctor. He was thrown in jail. He served his time in jail. He could not become a doctor because of the fact that he feigns some kind of insanity to get—not necessarily insanity— but some reason why he could not serve in the Israeli military. But he was allowed to become a politician. He is currently a politician.

There is that special circumstance of the Druze actually having to serve in the military, because of an agreement that their religious leader made with the State of Israel when the State of Israel was founded. But many, many Druze refuse to serve.

I think also—although this is unsubstantiated, it’s not backed by any kind of empirical evidence—I think that it is a little bit harder for Israel to do some of the things to the Christian community that it sometimes can get away with doing to the Muslim community.

Because Israel tries to paint itself as a victim mainly of Islam and Muslims, and to paint Islam as the kind of global enemy, and Israel being a safe haven for Christians. If you hear about Christian homes being demolished en masse, that wouldn’t look too good for Israel. In terms of maintaining that kind of public perception that it wants to maintain to keep itself as the victim, I think the level of discrimination when it comes to a lot of outright things are the same. Like I talked about the communities that can decide who lives and who doesn’t live within certain communities. This discriminates against all non-Jews.

Since the founding of the State of Israel, Israel has established over 600 communities and municipalities—Jewish. Not one for any Palestinians—Christian, Muslims or Druze, or otherwise—none.

This kind of discrimination is the same. But when you talk about the Bedouins, and Israel having a plan to move large-scale numbers of Bedouins out of their communities or to demolish homes not only in the Negev, but also in Lod, these are mainly Bedouins, Muslims. So I think that there’s that little bit of a distinction there.

I’m sorry. I went off too long in that question.

“Do you read Haaretz? What is its reputation inside Israel?” I do. Sometimes I read Haaretz. Not religiously, but its reputation inside Israel, it’s the left-wing newspaper. It’s still the Zionist left

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newspaper. I think Gideon talks a little bit about how they lost some followers, but it is seen as the very left. It’s not the mainstream newspaper. And so take that as you will.

I think the last one that I have time for is, “Can you describe what needs to be done to raise the massacre of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948?” Yesterday, we did just commemorate the massacre of Deir Yassin. I’m not sure what the question is as to raise up. But if it is to make it more well-known, I think that one of the things that we need to do is to document and commemorate. These massacres are ongoing. After Deir Yassin, just last summer and before we’re talking Gaza. I fear there probably will be more. We need to do what I think we’re doing right now—documenting, so very important. Not forgetting; continuing to commemorate and joining also political action to make a change.

Another plug for something that every one of us can do in our own communities, and that is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, because that is having a tangible effect on Israel. That is scaring the bleep out of Israel in that it is mobilizing its forces to fight that, because Israel is afraid of delegitimization.

The only reason they can continue doing what it’s doing is because it spends so much trying to legitimize their actions.

When we work to turn Israel into that pariah state that it is until it dismantles its colonial apartheid system, that is what we all need to do. You don’t have to go over to Palestine. You don’t have to get on a boat to Gaza. You do it within your own community, your own union, your own home. That is giving me hope for change. For Deir Yassin, for all the other massacres that have happened, and I fear might be, we will not forget. I truly believe that these victims will get justice one day. Thank you.

Moderator Delinda Hanley: We’re running a little late, but you wanted to say one more thing?

Gideon Levy: One final remark, a really final. Many times people tell me, look…The United States is like an aircraft carrier.

It takes time to move its directions. You must be less impatient, because historical changes take time. You should look at it in terms of history, of decades, of generations.

I must remind all of us that by the end of the day, we are dealing with the third generation under the occupation. With the fourth or fifth generation, ever since the State of Israel was established, those people deserve also something. Those people deserve dignity and freedom. They don’t have time to wait until this aircraft carrier will change its direction. Thank you.

Moderator Delinda Hanley: Thank you very much. Our panelists are wonderful. Thank you so much. We’ll have the next panel come up. ■ The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 5: How Does the Lobby Influence Congress?

How Does the Lobby Influence Congress?

Janet McMahon

M

Moderator

PANEL 5

Is It All About the Money?

M.J. Rosenberg

oderator Janet McMahon: Hello, I’m Janet McMahon, managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. As Delinda [Hanley] mentioned, our first issue came out 33 years ago this month—and we’ve been tracking AIPAC and its fellow travelers ever since. In particular, we’ve been monitoring pro-Israel PAC contributions to congressional and presidential candidates since 1986. You’ll find the totals through last November’s election in our latest issue. We’ve also included in your conference bag a page of totals for all 100 U.S. senators, who only run for re-election every six years. This will allow those of you who have senators to see what they’ve been up to while you may not have been looking.

M.J. Rosenberg is a contributor to The Nation and The Huffington Post, and his writings are widely reprinted throughout the world. He has special expertise on the Israel Lobby, having been employed by several pro-Israel organizations between 1973 and 1975, and 1982 and 1986. His last post was as editor of AIPAC’s Near East Report and as senior adviser to then-Executive Director Thomas Dine.

M.J. Rosenberg: I have to say, I was struck listening to Gideon Levy from Haaretz, that he writes for a major Israeli paper, everybody reads Haaretz worldwide, but in Israel itself, and he gets away with saying things that he could never say here. If Gideon Levy worked in the United States, the Lobby would have him fired. There is no question about that. And that’s why when you watch MSNBC and you wait for people that you like, who are liberals and progressives, to say something good on the Palestinians, they never will. And in that regard, Israel is infinitely ahead of the United States, which means Israel has one really great thing to say about itself: there is no Israel Lobby here. There’s just Israel. It just struck me listening to him. He has no equivalent in the United States.

Charles Krauthammer.

I have a somewhat unique perspective on AIPAC, owing to the fact that I was employed there for six years: as a volunteer for two years in the ’70s, as a senior staffer in the ’80s. But I also did see them from Capitol Hill, where I worked for 15 years for Democratic House members and senators.

One of my tasks at AIPAC was writing its manual about Israel and the Arabs, designed to be used as a guide by students, congressional staffers, rabbis, etc. to defend Israel against the “lies” being told by the other side. It’s called “Myths & Facts,” although inside of AIPAC it was always called “Myths & Myths.”

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M.J. Rosenberg: Is It All About the Money?

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You know, “myth.” This is standard hasbara. Myth: they say the Palestinians were driven from their homes by the Israeli army in 1948. Fact: the Palestinians actually left their homes in what became Israel in search of better lives in the West Bank and Gaza. That was part of my job, writing this stuff. But these myths have been around much longer than I’ve been.

I will use that frame “Myths & Facts” to address the most common misperceptions about AIPAC as I see them.

And I want to clarify at this point, I left AIPAC in 1986, and after that I’ve only dealt with them from the outside, from Capitol Hill, and not as a staffer. I didn’t leave them under bad terms, I wasn’t fired from AIPAC, in fact when I left in ‘86, it wasn’t as right-wing as it subsequently became. So, I’m not grinding an axe when you hear my feelings about that organization that was my employer.

But, the first myth I want to deal with is kind of a pro-AIPAC myth. It is that AIPAC’s role in intimidating members of Congress to support its demands through the use of financial pressure and intimidation is unique; that this pressure is an aberration invented

by Israel’s supporters to advance the Israeli government’s goals.

Fact: AIPAC is not an aberration. Basically every decision Congress makes is made with an eye on who has the money and how can a legislator either get some of it or avoid it being deployed against them.

No, not every decision is based on money. Issues like abortion, for instance, which is a religious kind of issue, is not based on money. But everything else is, most notably issues relating to banks, guns, Wall Street, labor, regulations to protect the consumer, health care, the environment, etc. And especially combatting any effort to prevent or reduce the effects of climate change, like when the Koch Brothers fight and lobby and use their money to prevent the development of alternative energy sources. I can hardly think of anything that AIPAC does that is less patriotic than the fact that the Koch brothers and their lobby go out there to state legislatures and city councils to make sure that they don’t authorize wind farms to allow us to be less dependent on Middle East oil. They don’t care about the Middle East oil part; they care about money in their own pocket. That’s our system today.

Yes, Middle East policy is determined by the highest bidder, which is AIPAC. But pretty much every policy discussed on Capitol Hill is determined by those with the money. If that means that democracy in America is itself a myth, so be it. Because, frankly, that is what I believe. It is not just AIPAC that is all about the

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money; it is everything that comes before Congress. And that’s a fact. And I say that from 15 years of being up there and watching it, and benefiting from it too, because you raise money for your bosses from the special interests that want him to do stuff for them.

The Lobby’s supporters, of course, argue that it is love for Israel, the supposed fellow democracy, that is behind its support. But that was never evident to me. Yes, there are members of Congress who are true believers, who “love Israel” and are sincerely devoted to its interests, as those legislators or Netanyahu sees those interests. But they are very few.

In fact, of the 29 Jewish legislators currently serving, most had little or no involvement with Israel before entering politics, with most making their first visits to Israel as either candidates for office or once they were able to visit on free junkets.

Yes, they all talk about loving Israel, about having grown up on Israel, about learning about Israel in Hebrew school. But take it with a grain of salt. Barney Frank, now retired, who was a reliable AIPAC supporter, talked a good game about his love for Israel, but it wasn’t intense enough to merit more than one reference in his just-published 300-page autobiography. And he just mentions it in passing with a whole bunch of other countries. Where was Barney’s love? It’s not in his book. It’s not there.

Yes, most of the Jews in Congress care about Israel, most Jews do, but that care would likely lead them to support dovish positions and not mindless hawkishness, were it not for the Lobby and the financial benefits of staying in its good graces.

After all, all but one of the Jewish members of Congress are Democrats and liberals who hold dovish views on every other foreign policy issue except Israel, where for some reason they become raving hawks. Same with non-Jewish Democratic supporters of Israel. Same thing.

Honestly, can anyone believe that Bernie Sanders really believed that the Gaza war was a good idea? Or Elizabeth Warren? Or Al Franken? Or any of the other big-time progressive types who supported it, or at the very least refused to condemn it, not even expressing a word of sympathy for the killing of kids on a beach? They couldn’t say it. If you watch, there are tapes. You see them on YouTube of Bernie Sanders screaming at constituents who brought up the slaughter in Gaza, and Elizabeth Warren literally running away from a constituent who asked a question.

The same applies to the Democrats who are joining Republicans to fight the Iran agreement. These are people who always The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 5: How Does the Lobby Influence Congress?

favor diplomacy over war, and certainly who support their Democratic president, especially when it comes to a diplomatic breakthrough like this. But not this time.

At this point we don’t know how many Democrats will fight Obama on lifting Iran sanctions, but it may be enough to override his veto. Just think about that: congressmen voting to override a veto by a president from their own party. Why would they do that?

The answer is that their position on this issue of war or peace is dictated by their determination to please AIPAC donors.

Chuck Schumer deserves special mention here, the next leader of Democrats in the Senate. His rise to the majority leader post, or whatever it’s going to be when he comes in, majority or minority leader, does not stem only from his charm, brilliance, or ability to place himself in front of television cameras.

It comes from his ability to raise money from his base, which is viewed as, and in fact is, Wall Street and pro-Israel donors.

Schumer no more “loves” Israel than he loves Wall Street. But he loves the money that these two sources provide to his campaign coffers and, through his efforts as chair of the Democratic Campaign Committee, to his colleagues and the Democratic Party itself. He became head of the campaign committee, would raise money from AIPAC, raise money from Wall Street, and then dole it out to all his friends in the party who are up for re-election. And then they know where it comes from.

This is important to note. Pro-Israel donors and AIPAC give so much money to candidates that the Democratic Party has, for years, been choosing only those closest to the lobby to run their campaign fund-raising operations. That is why Rahm Emanuel got to be chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, putting him both in place to block any candidate not sympathetic to AIPAC from running, which he did—he also blocked Arab Americans from running for Congress—and to grease his ascent to the top.

And that is why ambitious Democrats will do all they can to defeat Obama on Iran. It’s good for business.

As the song goes, “what’s love got to do with it?” Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Of course, there are the Christian conservatives who do love Israel, or say they do. Today, a large part of that love is in fact motivated by hatred of Barack Obama. Netanyahu has made himself President Obama’s enemy, so conservative Republicans love him.

And many love him and Israel for sincere reasons, religious, or because they view Israel as a bulwark against the Muslims.

Unlike legislators on the left, however, they are not hypocrites when it comes to Israel. I have nothing good to say about John McCain, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham or the rest of them, but their views on Israel fit in with their world view, which is that force works and diplomacy never does. Their support for Israel, up ’til now, has not been bought, because it didn’t have to be bought—although, according to this past Sunday’s New York Times, Republicans are now joining Democrats in terms of getting paid for their devotion to Israel, something Sen. Tom Cotton discovered when he wrote his letter to the president of Iran and was paid one million dollars. He probably does not need AIPAC money to win reelection in Arkansas, but the Harvard-educated veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan has his sights set higher than that. His devotion to the cause will certainly help him get there, and has already.

In general, though, the conservatives don’t matter much on matters relating to Israel. One, even for the most zealous defender of Israel in the Republican caucus, Israel is not central to them or their fund-raising—not central in the way fighting against gays or abortions or Obama or illegal immigration. Those are all their big issues. Yes, there is Sheldon Adelson and a few others who give money to right-wing candidates, but given that 80 percent of Jews are Democrats, as are the overwhelming majority of Jewish donors, these Christian conservatives are pretty insignificant in terms of the big picture.

In all my years on Capitol Hill, I never heard a single staff member say that they had to vote for some “Palestinians don’t exist” resolution that was on the House floor because they’re afraid of the Christians. No, they’re afraid of AIPAC. And AIPAC is not a Christian organization.

The fear is awesome to behold. In 2006—this is amazing—the White House and the Israeli government agreed on an $86 million aid package for the Palestinian Authority, to strengthen the PA, to help it withstand the Hamas threat. I remember talking to the leading Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

She had heard from the Israeli government that they wanted this $86 million to go to the Palestinians and that they in fact had drawn up the package with the State Department. So, she said, that being the case, she’ll support it.

Next thing I heard, she was opposing it. In fact, she said she

All but one of the Jewish members of Congress are Democrats and liberals who hold dovish views on every other foreign policy issue except Israel.

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differences with the community, would cut the sum in half, which the goals were the same, they’re she did. I paid her another call. always the same, which is to enWhy had she changed her mind sure the safety of Israel. We have with the president and the Israeli shared values, shared priorities. prime minister in agreement beAnd this issue, it’s going to be hind it? She said after she spoke one of the biggest issues in to me about it, she met with a Maryland, in the primary, that senior AIPAC lobbyist who told Donna Edwards is an enemy of her to cut it in half. I asked her Israel, the Jewish people. None why, and she said, “They don’t of it’s true. And Chris Van Hollen, think it’s the right time.” So it’s who has the same views as she not just the United States govdoes, he’s smartly insulated ernment that Israel [Lobby] is against them by making all his stronger than, it’s the Israeli govapologies. ernment, too.

That is the way it’s been for Now this legislator has a safe seat, but, like Schumer, she was (L-r) Retired Rep. James P. Moran (D-VA) greets panelists the past 30 years. That may be Nick Rahall and M.J. Rosenberg. changing or not, something we always in the fund-raising busiwill not know until we see how the effort to roll back the Iran ness—for herself, for other candidates—and she also became agreement goes. head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Her The Iran agreement is something the Israelis and the Lobby will loyalty was not to Israel but to AIPAC itself. After all, the Israeli not tolerate, which is why they’re going to the mat to defeat this government may be calling the shots, but it is AIPAC that is coordeal. If they succeed in defeating the agreement, and simultanedinating the PACs and, far more important than the PACs, the inously President Obama, with the support of two-thirds of Congress dividual donors. A lot more money goes to members of Congress that they induced to support Netanyahu, they will be viewed corfrom individual donors than from PACs. rectly as stronger than ever. They never brought down a president I saw in the news the other day that Congressman Chris Van before. This will be a first. If, however, they lose—if, however, Hollen, who is running for and likely to win the Democratic nomiObama succeeds in putting over this agreement—the Lobby will nation for senator from Maryland, has raised a million dollars for be badly damaged. Not only because they lost but because, in the his Senate campaign and has two million more in the bank. process, they were exposed as an ally of right-wing Republicans, That would not be the case had he not changed his tune on Isnot the bipartisan organization they claim to be. With the polls rael. Back in 2006, Chris Van Hollen got into deep hot water with showing that Israel itself is increasingly out of favor with the Dethe Lobby when he criticized Israel’s conduct of the war with mocratic base, they could be on the road to extinction.

Hezbollah. He expressed support for Secretary of State ConBut we can’t know that now. I can say, however, that I’m optidoleezza Rice’s statement that Israel was not taking care to avoid mistic—but not too optimistic. civilian casualties.

Let me conclude by congratulating American Educational Trust Poor Chris. He was new then; didn’t know that such an audaand the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy for convencious stand—expressing support for his own secretary of state— ing this incredibly timely conference. would cause the Lobby to go nuts. But it did. He was summoned Back when I first started at AIPAC, Steve Rosen was my boss to explain himself to the Jewish Community Council of Greater and was later indicted for espionage against the United States. (I Washington, the local branch of the Lobby, which he did. And then know, he’s still around, though. You’re allowed to get indicted for he issued a statement which retracted his earlier statement, but espionage, depends who you’re doing it for.) He sent me a now fahis mea culpas were not accepted. They insisted that he go to Ismous memo. It’s now famous because I gave it to The Washington rael and do his repentance there. And he did.

Post. He warned me, this is my second day there, never to talk The Lobby types still didn’t trust him, but now, a decade later, with about AIPAC’s activities outside the Lobby. He wrote, “A lobby is a Van Hollen demonstrating his devotion, he is the Lobby’s candidate, nightflower. It thrives in the dark and shrivels up in the sunlight.” with his opponent, Rep. Donna Edwards, assigned the former Chris I think that may be happening now, thanks to all our efforts. If it Van Hollen role of Israel critic. Last week, he was asked by the Baldoes, not only the United States, but Israel, the Palestinians and timore Jewish paper why he had ever done that in 2006. What were the world will be better off. This nightflower needs crushing. ■ you thinking? He said there was a situation where there were some The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 5: How Does the Lobby Influence Congress?

My Experience With the Israel Lobby; The Use of Dark Money Former Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV)

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Moderator Janet McMahon: Thank you very much, M.J. Our next two panelists are former members of Congress who did not stay in the good graces of the Israel Lobby. And there’s a third one here in the audience today that I’d like to recognize. It’s Representative Jim Moran of Virginia, who just retired.

Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Now, our next speaker was first elected to Congress at the age of 27, becoming its youngest number. Democrat Nick Rahall, a grandson of Lebanese immigrants, represented West Virginia from 1977 until January of this year. Not only has he repeatedly expressed concern about America’s relationship with Israel, but he was one of only eight House members to vote against the authorization for use of military force in 2002 that preceded the Iraq war. Thank you for that.

Nick Rahall: Thank you very much, Janet. I appreciate that introduction. I want to thank you and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and Andy Killgore, your publisher and founder, Delinda Hanley, Grant Smith, and also the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, for putting together this very important conference, and for all the work that has gone into making this the success that it is.

I want to also recognize a dear friend besides my former colleague, Jim Moran, who’s already been recognized. Another dear friend of all of us that’s in the room, the Arab League Ambassador Mohammed Al-Hussaini, who’s sitting right here in the front row.

Mr. Ambassador, good to see you.

Wow, after that previous speaker, I guess I’m going to be kind of tame. And my former colleague, Paul Findley, as well, from whom you’re going to hear, but it’s so good to see you again, Paul, and to have met your son here as well.

My first encounter with the Israeli Lobby—wow, it didn’t take long to think about that, because shortly after I was elected to Congress in 1977, I, along with a couple of my colleagues, went to the Middle East. Several in the delegation—Toby Moffett, Mary Rose Oakar—were of Lebanese ancestry, as I am, and we put Lebanon

first on our itinerary. Word got out pretty soon that we were going to Lebanon first. The Lobby swung into action: We know you’re a new member of Congress, but don’t you know nobody goes to the Middle East without going to Israel first? And then we’ll make sure you get into Lebanon or wherever else you want to go. We said no. We had made an executive decision and we decided, no, we’re going to go to Lebanon first, the land of our grandfathers, and that’s what we did.

Well, that was my first encounter.

Things didn’t get much better after that.

A couple of years later, 1982. Israel starts bombing Lebanon, ostensibly to rid the country of the PLO and to free its border from shelling from PLO terrorists into Israel. Okay, it went on awhile. It became pretty clear to myself that this was going a little bit beyond just ridding southern Lebanon of the PLO when bombs started falling in Beirut.

So I took the floor in the House, made the press back in my home district and everything. Pretty critical of Israel, that Ariel Sharon, the defense minister, was out of control, that Israel was acting like a monster and wanting to take over not just southern Lebanon but all of Lebanon. And my statements got press.

The Speaker of the House then, Tip O’Neill, came to me and said, “Nick, I want you to lead a congressional delegation and go to Beirut and whatever countries in the Middle East you want. I’ll give you the plane, and come back and give us all a report.” I said, “Yes, Mr. Speaker. I’m honored you invited me to do that.” So we had a CODEL [congressional delegation] that July, the end of July 1982. I was the chairman; Mary Rose Oakar a member; Mervyn Dymally, the late Mervyn Dymally from California; David Bonior, who later became majority whip of the House of Representatives; and Pete McCloskey. You’ll recall all these members, Paul. And Elliott Levitas, a Jewish member from Georgia.

We took off. We ended up our whole itinerary covered six countries, meeting with five heads of states. The only one we did not meet with was the king of Jordan. He was unavoidably out of the country at that time. But we went into Lebanon and we were able

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to meet with Chairman Arafat in the bowels of Beirut at the end of July, with Israeli bombs falling all over the place. Several different rendezvous during the course of a 24-hour period to escape our State Department escorts who, you know, wanted to make sure we didn’t do such silly stuff against U.S. law. They kept on warning us, you can be imprisoned for meeting with Arafat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And we went on with it anyway. We came out of that meeting about 4:00 a.m. that night, all the press of the world was there waiting for us. They’d already heard about the meeting. Chairman Arafat signed a piece of paper that we put in front of him that said he recognized all U.N. resolutions relevant to the Palestinian question. It’s debatable—it’s debatable then, it’s been debatable since— whether that really meant recognition of Israel or not. I thought, and still think, it did. Although it may have taken a couple of years later for him to formally do that, twostate solution recognized, etc.

But when we came back home, the Speaker, of course, very much insisted on a report on our trip. We met with him.

We met with officials of the White House to brief them, the National Security Council, etc.

Well, four of my colleagues, which shall remain nameless at this point, but they introduced the resolution on the floor of the House to impeach those of us who met with Arafat for treason. For treason!

The New York Post ran our pictures front page—the mostwanted, with the most ugly mug shots they could find—with the four of us who met with Arafat. Elliott Levitas, rather, did not, I must say, did not meet with Arafat. Although the next day, we had meetings scheduled with Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.

When the worldwide press hit—we just met with Arafat the night before—they immediately cancelled. Elliott Levitas got on the phone to Menachem Begin’s office, he said, “Listen, Mr. Prime Minister, this is a Jewish member of Congress. I don’t care who my colleagues met with yesterday, you’re going to continue your appointment with them and you’re going to meet with them or you’ll have trouble from this Jewish member of Congress when I get back home.”

Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Sharon put us back on their schedule, we met with them. We went into Ariel Sharon’s office. It became a shouting match right off the bat. We questioned him on the use of cluster bombs, against agreements with the United States, when they were using those bombs for offensive purposes rather than defensive purposes. And one thing that struck me right off the bat was a map on the wall in Ariel Sharon’s office. There was no Lebanon. There was no Jordan. There were no boundaries at all; it was all Israel. Scary. Really scary.

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So fast forward a couple of years, after we got through ‘82, I went back later that year with the late Jack Murtha to view our peacekeeping forces when we were truly peacekeeping forces, at the end of ‘82, when we were there to evacuate the innocent PLO, or all the PLO, actually, from Lebanon as part of the agreement.

But fast forward to the years of Oslo in ‘93, things looked pretty good. I was invited to go with President [Bill] Clinton, and actually in ‘98, after Oslo, with him to Palestine, to Gaza. He was the first U.S. president to set foot on Palestinian soil. We opened the Gaza Airport, we met with Arafat. President Clinton spoke to the Palestinian National Council. Arafat spoke right after him. It was all hunky-dory, everything was great.

That evening in the suite at the King David [Hotel], when we had our nightly meeting to find out what all we did during the course of the day, President Clinton was scheduled to address the Knesset the next day. He puts his arm around me and he says, “Nick,”—and Sandy Berger is right there on one side and Madeleine Albright on the other side. He said, “I’m feeling a little bad, I’m wondering if you’ll give my address to the Knesset tomorrow.” I thought Madeleine Albright was going to have a heart attack. The president, of course, was kidding.

Then in ‘95, my experience with the Israeli Lobby, I get a letter of invitation to go to Israel, May of 1995, with AIPAC. I looked at the letter, did a couple of double takes. I said, this can’t be real. I asked my staff, please verify that this letter came from AIPAC and that this individual really signed the invitation. They checked it out and came back and said, “Boss, this letter is a real invite, it’s not a hoax.” I said, “Okay, I’m going to accept. I’ll go.”

I think AIPAC was just as surprised I accepted it as I was that they had invited me. But I did go on that trip, and I said, under one condition, that is that I can sneak over to Gaza, go over to Gaza, and [travel] in any I want to, in order to meet with Chairman Arafat. They thought about it for a couple of days and came back and said, “Yes, that’s fine.” I don’t think they believed I was really going to do it.

We get in Tel Aviv the night before I was scheduled to go into Gaza and meet with Arafat. AIPAC finds out I’m serious, I’m really going over the next day and meet with Arafat. So that night, a couple members of AIPAC’s board come to me and say, “Hey, Nick. Can we go over with you? Can we go with you?” So I made some calls and, yes, it was agreed. The next day, several members of the board of directors of AIPAC went with Nick Rahall to meet with Yasser Arafat in Gaza. They were just stumbling over themselves to get their pictures taken with him after our meeting ended up.

Don’t you know nobody goes to the Middle East without going to Israel first?

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PANEL 5: How Does the Lobby Influence Congress?

Of course, after that it’s all history. It’s gone downhill. But the Lobby—you know, much has been said about the Lobby, the Jewish Lobby. And it’s just so massive and so all-inclusive that it’s hard to put a finger on one individual. In fact, over the previous years—I will get to the present day in a moment—but it’s harder to find any one group and then, of course, that’s their goal.

And let me say a word about lobbies. It’s part of our small democratic system of government in this country. Any ethnic group— Jewish, Arab, Greek, Italian, Spanish—has the right to organize and petition their government for redress of their grievances. Democratic right. I have no problem with that. Where my problem comes in is when those lobbies put the interest of the country, a foreign country, from which they come, ahead of the interest of the United States of America and not register as a foreign agent, which is also required by our laws.

So to lobby is fine. M.J.’s mentioned the many different lobbies that exist here and the way in which members of Congress react, and I don’t deny a bit of that. But I think in the case of the Israelis, the Jewish Lobby, they are so many light years ahead of all the others. There may be disagreements within the various groups that comprise the Jewish Lobby. There are disagreements, I’m sure, but the public image is presented as one unified voice.

The Arab lobby, light years behind. There’s many different groups across this town, across America, that represent various Arab groups. They have different agendas—whether it’s to fight discrimination, whether it’s to lobby to get Americans of Arab descent elected, whether it’s to lobby the Congress of the United States—whatever their goal, they’re all worthy, good goals.

But these disagreements and those disagreements between those groups often hit the press much more than disagreements within Jewish lobbying organizations. And, of course, as the ambassador knows, there are disagreements in the Arab world among Arab countries. Unfortunately, that hurts the Arab message, if there is one, when it comes to lobbying the Congress or changing American public opinion.

We’re making progress? Yes, I think the more and more that the media comes around to demonstrating what’s happening on the ground in the Middle East, the more Americans and legislators travel to the Middle East—and not with AIPAC, but in an objective fashion—and see the facts on the ground, the more, at least privately, minds are changing in this city and on Capitol Hill.

Note, I said the word privately.

So there are groups that lobby in this town that put America’s best interest first, and that is my biggest concern when it comes to the Jewish Lobby. There are too many times, and certainly the Mearsheimer and Walt report in 2006—we all recall that report on lobbying or the Lobby in this country—gives numerous examples of where American politicians’ minds have been changed when they’ve perhaps almost stepped over that line, or maybe even did step over that line, in criticizing Israel, and maybe even used the words my good friend Paul Findley has used, which is let’s have an objective American foreign policy that allows Americans to be objective so they can bring the sides together and reach a comprehensive peace. That, as we know, has been a trip word that has caused many a politician to run amok of the Lobby and therefore have to retract and have to do what has been described that certain candidates for Senate in Maryland have just been doing recently.

Today, ever since 2010, in the Citizens United decision by our illustrious George Bushappointed Supreme Court, the way lobbying is done, the way campaign expenditures are amassed, is quite different.

Today we have unregulated and undisclosed humongous amounts of money being spent in political campaigns. The U.S. Supreme Court and Citizens United opened that up through the Freedom of Speech clause. Now, I have no problem with freedom of speech. What I have a problem with is the undisclosed nature of that decision, whereby these monies can be given to these independent expenditure groups and nobody will ever know who gave the money to those groups.

Now, when we ran our personal campaigns, every penny coming in had to be reported, every payment going out had to be reported. But not so with these independent expenditures. And by the very nature of their being legal, they cannot be pro- any candidate. They have to be anti-, thereby lending so much more to negativity about campaigns today and the dysfunctionality and the polarization of Congress after the elections. This is certainly one of the biggest factors in that dysfunctionality, it’s this Citizen’s United decision. It’s anti- whether it’s the incumbent or a challenger. The person that benefits from all that negativity never has to report a penny on his or her campaign expenditure, or anything about the millions of dollars of ads run against their opponent.

What do we know? That leads to the question, what does that person stand for? Who benefits from all the negative against the other person? We don’t know. Never does that person have to say

The next day, several members of the board of directors of AIPAC went with Nick Rahall to meet with Yasser Arafat in Gaza.

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what he or she stands for. So what we’ve seen is a hijacking of our democracy by these outside independent expenditures.

There’s front groups, of course. Like in my case in this past election, the front group was Americans for Prosperity, AFP. The public name associated with AFP, the Koch brothers. Their total expenditure in my congressional race was probably $14 million by most reports. That includes all of the independent expenditures and my opponent’s spending as well.

And again, we have no idea where the money for the AFP, Americans for Prosperity or prosperous, whatever you want to call it, we have no idea who gave to them. I don’t know whether it’s my co-operator’s money. I highly suspect it. I don’t know whether Sheldon Adelson’s money was involved. I highly suspect it, although he had his own separate group that he gave to. He called it the Young Guns. That was a major part of the Republican operation last November.

So what we’ve seen now are these billionaires, whether they’re Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and others—and there’s billionaires on the Democratic side, I don’t mean to paint this all as one side—but these billionaires using these dark money expenditures have actually dwarfed AIPAC. I mean, AIPAC was like a little lamb, a pauper going around the street asking for money these days. And the perfect example of how I think they’re controlling the strings in the Congress was, first of all, this year, the invitation to the prime minister of Israel to address Congress without State Department okay, without White House okay, and two weeks before a domestic political campaign in the State of Israel. Inviting the prime minister to come and give a political speech before the Congress of the United States two weeks before his toughest re-election in his life.

What was that followed up by? A letter signed by 47 senators to Iran, not to the president of our country but to Iran, expressing their deepest problems with what even—it’s not even a deal now, of a U.S.-Iran nuclear arms control agreement. I want one as much as the Israelis, believe me, I don’t want to see Iran develop nuclear weapons. And I have the same concern that our allies in the region have. But by golly, you don’t do it, as it has been described already today, by continuing to spread fear.

We saw what happened when Ariel Sharon and George Bush’s son did that in Iraq. It’s Iraq all over again. The falsification of what the threat is, and certainly Iran is not an existential threat to the United States—and it may be to Israel, I’m not going to debate Israel politics on that—but there we find Israel and United States interest diverging. They’re not one and the same. We can deal with Iran in a little different perspective than can Israel. We should

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not have 47 United States senators sending a letter to Iran trying to tell them what the Congress of the United States are going to do and how they’re going to override the president, because this is just not in our best interest, in my opinion.

Now, the fact that the gentleman from Arkansas, the originator of this letter, [has] been in the Senate, what, for 49 days? I guess he knows everything about the world. But anyway, the fact that he had to deny that this letter was cooked up in a suite of Sheldon Adelson’s in Nevada, the fact that he even had to deny that publicly, I think speaks something, too, about where the origins of this letter really came from. There, again, we see a hijacking of our democracy in this country by billionaires intent on controlling the Republican leadership of this Congress. That is so disheartening, disconcerting, disastrous, damnable to the best interest of the United States of America and to our foreign policy. It leads other countries to say, what’s going on in the United States? Are they trusting the prime minister of a foreign country before they’re trusting the word of their own president of the United States?

Then how can we trust the United States? I mean, just think about what a message that is.

And getting back to the Koch brothers, and M.J. referenced this when he talked about how they wanted to defeat everything other than, I don’t think he quite said this but I’ll say it, other than what is oil-based. Here they come into West Virginia. I may be the most pro-coal Democratic member of Congress in the Congress of United States. They ran a campaign against me being anti-coal as if they’re pro-coal, when you know the real reason is they’re pro-oil and gas. That’s where they made their money, so why shouldn’t they be after the most pro-coal Democrat in the United States Congress? Their own hidden agendas, their own profits is what’s running this and, again, I think it’s frightening for the future of democracy in this country.

So let me try to say one last word about the Lobby, and to say that it would appear that the mere existence of the Lobby and all its ramifications in this country suggests that unconditional support for Israel— unconditional support, the blank check mentality, the Pavlovian reflex of so many in the Congress toward Israel—is not in America’s national interest. If it was, why would one need such an organized, wellorganized, well-oiled special interest group to bring it about?

So I conclude by saying once again, I want to thank everybody who has put this conference together. I think you have provided a forum for some thought-provoking ideas, some debate, certainly much more debate on the question probably in this one day than I’ve seen in my 38 years on the floor of the House of Representatives, but at least the debate is there. Thank you to each of you. ■

Independent expenditures cannot be pro- any candidate. They have to be anti-.

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PANEL 5: How Does the Lobby Influence Congress?

How to Tame Lobbies Like AIPAC Former Rep. Paul Findley (R-IL)

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Moderator Janet McMahon: Many Americans first learned about the Israel Lobby when they read our next speaker’s groundbreaking book, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, first published in 1985. It subsequently was translated into Arabic, German, Urdu, Malaysian and Indonesian, so one can truthfully say that the word has spread!

Paul Findley served the 20th District of Illinois as its Republican representative from 1961 to 1983. He became involved in Middle East issues after helping a constituent who was imprisoned in South Yemen. As he heard complaints about U.S. bias in the region, and began to learn the reason behind that bias, he became a target of the Israel Lobby in this country.

Paul Findley lost his election in 1982 after his congressional district was redrawn—another tactic used to eliminate critics of Israel.

Since then, he has continued speaking out: writing numerous books, speaking to audiences around the world, and co-founding the Council for the National Interest.

It is indeed an honor to introduce Congressman Paul Findley.

Paul Findley: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very pleased to have this opportunity, a special treat to hear the others on the panel.

And I’d like to recommend first of all that, Nick [Rahall], you reconsider and run for election again, and I’ll either support you or oppose you, whichever will help you more.

I congratulate the people who founded the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and those who have survived and have initiated what I hope will become an annual conference like this.

I’m delighted to be here. I appreciate the cooperation of my son Craig. I couldn’t travel without him, so he took off three days to enable us, me, to be here. And I appreciate the contribution to public understanding of the Arab world that I believe was the main motivation of Dick Curtiss and Andy Killgore in starting the American Educational Trust and the magazine, the bi-monthly, that is sponsoring this event. They have served their country well, and I think the initiative represented here in this room is a good one that I hope will be repeated in the years to come.

In recent months, the U.S. government has displayed on inter-

national television for all to see the shameful subservience to Israel and its Lobby. That’s what brings me here tonight.

Turn your thoughts back to last [summer]. The thundering assault on Gaza, that tiny open-air prison, where people have to struggle just to live from one day to the other. The toll of death: 2,200. The total injured: 11,000 more.

Shattered schools, hospitals, almost everything that made up the struggling economy of Gaza was shattered in just a few hours. World leaders thundered their opposition, all except one leader, and that was Mr. Obama.

A reporter finally accosted him and said, “What do you say about the Gaza war?” I was watching television that night, and I was struck by the grim countenance of President Obama. All he said was, the Israelis have the right of self-defense. Period. Nothing else. It seemed to me that that was all he was permitted to say by a higher authority. And no reporter pressed him for elaboration. To me that’s sad, that the reporters of the major media in this country are just as overwhelmed and paralyzed by the Israel Lobby as our government seems to be most of the time.

A month ago, as Nick said, an amazing event took place on Capitol Hill. And I know that Nick Rahall feels as I do and Jim Moran feels the same way, that there is something sacred in the House of Representatives chamber. It’s one of the cherished heirlooms of our republic. The symbol, if there is one single outstanding pre-eminent symbol of liberty and free speech, is the House chamber. And it was a sad moment for me when I realized that the Lobby for Israel has sufficient power to gain control of the House chamber and to put on what is nothing more than a campaign speech for the benefit of Netanyahu 10 days before his bid for a fourth term. Our government cooperated in that desecration of that heirloom of our great republic, the House chamber.

And as a background for this choreographed performance, 90 percent of the Senate and 90 percent of the House showed up to take part as a part of the cheering section. It was a rude and crude moment for our country. The massive worldwide television audience that day received shocking evidence of AIPAC’s towering

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Former Rep. Paul Findley (R-IL): How to Tame Lobbies Like AIPAC

political clout over our government. I can’t see it any other way. It was done in precise defiance of the U.S. president, done in defiance of the presidency itself. It makes me wonder what overcame the Republicans in the House of Representatives to bypass tradition and decorum.

But it’s a pity also that our president had not sent a word notifying Netanyahu that he would not be welcome in America until after election day. It didn’t happen. You know, do any of you remember the Canadian episode that involved Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, and Quebec? The French province in Canada was all stirred up about the possibility of secession of Quebec, and Charles de Gaulle, a man I admire intensely, made a big mistake. He decided to rally the troops, and he was on a boat going up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec to take part in the celebration. A lesser person, the prime minister of Canada, said, “Mr. Charles de Gaulle, turn back, this is not the right time for the president of France to make an appearance.” What a marvel that was, because Charles de Gaulle immediately turned around. He didn’t get on Quebec’s soil, he got on the [St.] Lawrence, turned around, went back. As he should, and as Mr. [Lester] Pearson directed him to do.

Quite a difference in the reaction of the president, or the prime minister, of Canada, and the president of the United States. And if Obama had ordered Netanyahu not to come until after election day, I’m sure that the masses of the American people would shout with joy. But it didn’t happen. AIPAC even then showed its immense power over our government. That’s the tip of the iceberg.

The show on Capitol Hill and the silence of President Obama about the desecration of Gaza.

And yet, I saw on television just the other day, Netanyahu said, “I respect the president of the United States, I respect the presidency of America.” What a lie. What a contemptible lie to come from a head of a government.

The tips of the iceberg give no hint of the suffocating influence of the Lobby for Israel across America. It’s as if a blanket, a suffocating blanket, had been spread across the entire nation. It’s not just what happens in Washington, what happens on Capitol Hill, [but] what happens in other places.

I doubt that many people realize the extent of the paralyzing influence that reaches across the nation. Not just in big cities, but in small towns and hamlets. There are people that are willing to

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spend time to guard the gates, so to speak, for Israel. Everyday, they’re on the alert for anyone who might say something or do something that would show disapproval of Israel. These agents exist by the hundreds and hundreds throughout the country. And, of course, they are concentrated heavily as well in Washington.

I’ll give you just one example. Harold Saunders, a great diplomat that I worked with quite closely over the years, told me that if he wanted to get a letter to the secretary of state, his boss, that dealt with misbehavior by Israel, he said, “I have to sit down, type the letter myself, go to the secretary’s office, and hand it to him personally. If I would put the letter in the usual desk-to-desk transition, up to the top of the State Department building, it would have emerged emasculated so thoroughly that the intention would never appear.”

Imagine that. Couldn’t depend on a letter emerging, arriving as intended to the secretary of state. He was very upset when he told me that.

There are hundreds of people in our government who feel that they have a duty to guard Israel against any mischief or any harm. They aren’t paid. They aren’t paid by AIPAC. They’re paid by the taxpayers, but they feel this total obligation to defend Israel—and I, in a sense, admire people like that, but it has resulted in the destruction of free speech about Israel and the U.S. throughout the nation. This is a rare occasion, here tonight, of people openly discussing the misbehavior of the state of Israel, criticizing the Lobby for the state of Israel. It’s a remarkable occasion because you would search the city over and you won’t find another like this. And it’s a great credit to the leadership of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs [and IRmep] that this meeting is being held.

Now, they act out of fear, they fear that Israel will be hurt. Others act out of fear for different reasons. They fear that they might be accused, even by indirection, of being anti-Semitic. The charge of anti-Semitism is still the most powerful instrument of intimidation that Israel’s Lobby has. And it exists among these people that feel duty bound to protect Israel every step of the way.

And if you think back about your home country, your home village in the past, you can be sure that someone in every village, every city, every hamlet, is there to protect the interests of the state of Israel.

And it’s a very scary scene, one that is not receiving any attention in our government at all. It’s not fear of bodily harm that causes people to watch what they say about Israel. It’s the fear that they might be considered a border case, at least, of anti-Semitism. And most of the

I don’t know of anything short of a constitutional amendment that can correct the terrible menace of lobbies based here in this city.

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people in this country still believe that that’s the worst stain any person could have on his or her reputation, anti-Semitism.

The Lobby is something more than just a suffocating blanket across the country. It’s something more than a lobby that has enough moxie, enough hubris, to get things done on Capitol Hill and in the White House. It is also a large, effective lobby, as Nick mentioned. And it is one of a small group of giant Washingtonbased lobbies that have had the effect of destroying true representative government in this country. They are the power that makes big decisions on public policy, not the people who are elected from their home districts in the states to serve in Congress.

It’s not that group that holds the real power. It’s a group of unelected people who manage big lobbies that have big money to spend in order to control what’s done as public policy.

And, as Nick [Rahall] has pointed out, that’s a great difficulty to overcome, because the Supreme Court has declared that the right of free speech extends even to corporations, and these corporations, like others in these lobbies, need not disclose who they are or what they’re spending their billions on.

I conclude that the only real hope is a constitutional amendment that will authorize the Congress to limit campaign spending. And

the key provision of the amendment that I would recommend is one that declares that no contributor can send money into a constituency unless that contributor is himself or herself a domiciled resident of that constituency and is able to swear that he or she has been domiciled in that very constituency for two years. Otherwise, no qualification. I don’t know of anything short of a constitutional amendment that can correct the terrible menace of lobbies based here in this city. They are running the country today and they’re going to run it until we find a way legally to restore true representative government in our society.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

I thank you so much for that response. I came here tonight hoping that I had one good speech left. I’ll soon be 94 and I guess I’ve come pretty close to that point. Let me close by quoting my hero, another Illinois man who became president. He said, “Fellow citizens, you cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we’ve passed will light us down to the very latest generation. No insignificance or significance can spare a one of us. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.”

Thank you very much. ■

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Moderator Janet McMahon: Thank you so much, Congressman Findley. One of the questions we got was: “after all these enlightening speeches, please elaborate how can we strategize to defeat the ‘deceitful Jewish Lobby,’ AIPAC,” and I think the issue of one person, one district, one contributor is crucial. Another question we got says, “do you see a large difference between the atmosphere in our current Congress toward Israel and the Congress you served in? Do you think that Congress feels differently toward Israel than it did when you were serving?”

Paul Findley: I believe that the scene is much more adverse to good government than it was in my time. I was proud to be a Republican and I cannot say that today after the behavior of the House, of Republicans, in regard to the treaty with Iran. But the quality of elected representatives is not going to mean much until the Constitution is amended to permit strict rules on campaign spending. And when those strict rules come about, we will see a massive change in public interest in voting, a vast increase I’m sure that will come about because they see what’s going on and they realize that the system is broken, it’s not working as it must.

Thank you very much.

Moderator Janet McMahon: Congressman Nick Rahall, do you have a comment, from the Democrat?

Nick Rahall: If I could just say what Paul said, I don’t disagree with what he said but, you know, the bottom line comes down to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Congress has passed campaign finance reform. We’ve made many stabs at it.

No matter what we do, of course, loopholes are going to be found, but it comes down to the Supreme Court of the United States. They’re the ones that gave us the Citizens United decision.

Paul Findley: I think during our time there, a bill was passed to put a $40,000 limit on congressional spending. It passed, of course, but the Supreme Court knocked it down right away.

Nick Rahall: And that’s I guess one of the questions I had, which was “a recent Supreme Court decision, what was the role of the Jewish Lobby?” I guess another question was, “is it the Jewish Lobby or Israeli Lobby?” It should be the Israeli Lobby, by the way. In the April 2014 Supreme Court decision striking down political donation caps on, I cannot say what was in the Supreme Court of the United States’ mind, but that was one of the questions I had.

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PHOTO PHIL PORTLOCK

Moderator Janet McMahon: Yeah, M.J. [Rosenberg]?

Paul Findley: My hearing is not adequate, I didn’t hear what you said.

Nick Rahall: I said I thought the bottom line is it’s up to the Supreme Court of the United States to limit and to change our campaign finance as well.

They opened the floodgates right there.

And then they piled on just a couple months ago with the decision lifting the individual caps on contributions.

Moderator Janet McMahon: And M.J. [Rosenberg], you have a comment?

M.J. Rosenberg: Yeah, I just wanted—I’m the Jewish guy on the (L-r) Nick Rahall, M.J. Rosenberg, Paul Findley and Janet McMahon. panel.

Americans. So it’s really important—it hurts, it pains me a little to Moderator Janet McMahon: And I’m the woman. have anyone think that way about their next door neighbor who’s M.J. Rosenberg: That’s true. You can’t fill every slot.

Jewish. He seems like a liberal progressive guy and then you Moderator Janet McMahon: Oh, yeah. think, but is he really one of these flag-waving Netanyahu people?

M.J. Rosenberg: And I just wanted—one person wrote and He’s probably not, because that is a small minority. said, “what’s your reaction to calling AIPAC the Jewish Lobby?”

But the few thousand of them that do exist—and it only takes a The correct term—I don’t have a particular reaction. I’m not one few thousand—are incredibly rich. So your person next door in of these people who say, oh, it’s anti-Semitic to call it the Jewish Arlington or Silver Spring, that’s not—it’s people who live in ManLobby. It’s shorthand, that’s the way we talk. The fact is it’s a prohattan and the Hamptons and Beverly Hills and all these people Israel Lobby, except it’s not even really that because is it really in who are just loaded and have made Israel their ticket to power.

Israel’s interests to have endless war? I mean, let’s just forget They love making members of Congress grovel to them. Is it names. I think it’s important to know and to recall that the Jewish about Israel? A small part. Mostly it’s about making members of Lobby or the pro-Israel Lobby or whatever we call it represents a Congress grovel to them. And they also put in plugs for their busismall minority of Jewish Americans. nesses while they’re there.

Every four years the American-Jewish Committee, which is the The Jewish community is turning; it’s changing. This Iran thing, largest and wealthiest Jewish organization—it’s not AIPAC, it’s and particularly the appearance of Netanyahu, I think, in the halthe American-Jewish Committee—does a poll. It’s a scientific lowed heirloom of the House of Representatives was deeply poll—they do it with The New York Times. It’s exit polls when embarrassing to almost every Jew I know. We were cringing— people come from voting. What did Jews and others vote? What you think you were cringing? We were cringing. So I mean it’s are the issues that they vote on? not, we have to do something about this Lobby, and no one In both 2008 and 2012, the percentage of the Jewish voters for should ever allow an unrepresentative lobby to speak for them, whom Israel is in their top five concerns is four percent. Four perand the Jewish community does not do what they should do, cent. The fact of the matter is, despite what AIPAC and their paid which is to say, “You don’t speak for us.” Because by being silent, liars tell us, Jews are for the most part in this country what they they allow this impression to be there. always were. They are liberals, they are progressives and without Moderator Janet McMahon: Well, thank you very much. I’m the non-AIPAC Jews, people like—Democrats like this guy would afraid that’s all the time we have. We’re supposed to have a probably have a much harder time getting funds, and this guy too. break but we’re running behind so I’m not sure if we’re going to I mean the fact is that’s always been true about Jews. have a break or the next panel. So thank you very much. Okay, And what [Sheldon] Adelson and AIPAC want you to think is Dale [Sprusansky], we’ll get the next panel ready, it’s on Iran. that the Jews are becoming Republicans. Well, wait ’til the next Thank you, Congressman Findley, and Congressman Rahall, and election, they voted for Barack Obama 78 percent. The only M.J. Rosenberg. Thank you so much. ■ group that outdid Jews in voting for Barack Obama were African The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 6: Is There an Iraq-Iran Continuum?

Is There an IraqIran Continuum?

Dale Sprusansky

M

Moderator

PANEL 6

The Push for War on Iran Gareth Porter

oderator Dale Sprusansky: Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian. He specializes in U.S. foreign and military policy. He is the author of five books, the most recent being Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He will be signing that book after this panel, if you want to stick around for that. In 2012, he won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Investigative Journalism by the U.K.-based Gellhorn Trust. He will discuss the push for war on Iran.

Gareth Porter: Thanks very much to the organizers of this event. This is the second such event that I’ve participated in. I’m really happy to see the great audience for the event and wish the organizers all the best in continuing this tradition, as other speakers have suggested.

Now I know that Reza Marashi is going to be focusing more laser-like on the recent accord and what he expects to happen in the near future on this. But I do feel that I need to introduce what I have to say about the push for war in Iran with a few remarks at least about the recent developments regarding the negotiations in Lausanne, because it does directly link to a key part of what I have to talk about, which is the role that Israel has played in the threat of war between the United States and Iran.

The recent understanding, interim tentative agreement reached in Lausanne, as I think all of you know by now, has suddenly been shown to be vulnerable to differences that were picked apart, if you will, as a result of things that happened immediately after the initial agreement. That is to say, initially after the joint statement by the P5+1 represented by Ms. [Federica] Mogherini of the EU on one side and Foreign Minister [Javad] Zarif on the Iranian side.

Almost immediately, it became clear that there were some other voices that were not prepared to simply allow that joint statement to stand, including specifically the U.S. State Department, which issued its own text interpreting the tentative agreement, which departed specifically from the agreed joint statement with regard to the question of lifting sanctions.

And that issue of lifting sanctions, I don’t want to go into the details about this. It will be up to Reza to the extent that he is going to dissect that problem. But specifically, the question of lifting sanctions is linked to the role of Israel through specifically the problem of “possible military dimensions.” I put that in quotation marks, the famous PMD issue, which was one of the issues that Iran pledged within this tentative agreement to implement in terms of carrying out the totality of the agreement.

The Iranians agreed to implement a series of steps. One of which—all the other steps had to do with either the transparency of their nuclear program towards specific steps to constrain their nuclear

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program. But there’s one issue which departed from that set, and that was the possible military dimensions of the Iranian program.

PMD—possible military dimensions—refers to allegations that have been made over the years by the International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as Western governments, that Iran, in fact, did carry out nuclear weapons work, particularly between 2001 and 2003, but there are other allegations that extend at least potentially beyond 2003.

Now the linkage here with the possible military dimensions is that the Iranians agreed, supposedly under this framework, to explain or to give adequate access to the IAEA, that the IAEA needs to be able to understand the issues that have to do with the allegations that have to do with the supposed Iranian nuclear weapons activities. And what I need to do at this point is to explain how this issue of possible military dimensions is in fact not a genuine issue, but an issue that was created—or, as I put it in the title of my book, manufactured—part of a manufactured crisis that has been with us now for a decade or a little bit more than a decade, which revolves around the notion that Iran has been deceiving the rest of the world for many years, that it’s had covertly a nuclear weapons program, that it has always coveted nuclear weapons.

My book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, lays out the real history of this issue of the Iran nuclear program, and shows that there has been essentially a false narrative created, layer upon layer over the years, that goes back to the Clinton administration, certainly. And then it was developed, obviously much more effectively, much more in a farreaching way, by the Bush administration, handed over to the Obama administration, which has continued to take the position that that, in fact, represents the true history of the Iran nuclear issue. I don’t have the time to go over that history, except insofar as it relates to the specific problem of the role that Israel played in creating that manufactured crisis.

To try to summarize this in just a couple of minutes, what actually happened here was that in 2001, when the George W. Bush administration came into office, it had in its National Security team a group of neoconservatives who were quite determined to carry out a strategy in the Middle East that involved regime change, a very far-reaching strategy of regime change which essentially would remove all the regimes in the Middle East who were not client states of the United States and Israel, or on the same side as the United States and Israel.

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Of course, we all know what the consequences of that strategy were with regard to Iraq. The neoconservatives working with the full cooperation and support of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office put together what amounted to a false intelligence dossier that did show supposedly that Iraq had programs of weapons of mass destruction. That was the political lever that was used to push this country into a mood to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Now, the same individuals in the Bush administration were planning to do the same thing with regard to Iran.

Iran was on the list of five regimes which were supposed to be changed through the use of military force, if necessary. And they did believe, according to Hillary Mann Leverett, who was on the National Security Council staff in 2001 and 2002 and talked to some of the people who were part of this neoconservative coterie, they in fact expected that the United States would have to use force in Iran.

This Iranian part of the plan was not to be carried out immediately. They had to consolidate control over Iraq militarily and then they could move on, using the military facilities that they would control in Iraq to put pressure on, to intimidate and, if necessary, to actually project military force into the rest of the region, including specifically Iran.

As we all know, that didn’t happen, to a great extent because the resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was far stronger than the neoconservatives ever dreamed. As a result of that, they did not have the opportunity really to push on to Iran. There was an effort made in 2007 by the vice president’s office, by Cheney himself, to propose a bombing of targets in Iran, in case they could find an excuse [by accusing Iran of interfering] in Iraq. But the Pentagon squashed that very quickly, routed it easily, according to what I understand, what I read and what I’m told. So that was really the end of that threat, at least at that period of the history of this issue.

And the role that Israel played in this plan that the neoconservatives had was to come up with the intelligence evidence that would be used against Iran. This happened in 2004, when a set of documents mysteriously materialized and found its way into the hands of Western intelligence. We now know that it was the German intelligence agency which obtained the documents from, at that time, an unknown source, and then turned them over to the CIA, which then, ultimately, through the Bush administration, these were turned over to the International Atomic Energy Agency and became the centerpiece of the political campaign— The Israel Lobby Conference

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There has been essentially a false narrative created, layer upon layer over the years, that goes back to the Clinton administration.

an extremely successful political campaign that has been waged ever since 2008 up to the present time, to convince the entire world that, in fact, that Iran stood accused with credible evidence of having had a secret nuclear weapons program. Therefore, it cannot be trusted and must be subjected to an extraordinary set of arrangements which would go 15 to 20 years with a set of constraints, which no other state has ever been asked to accept.

So, just a few words, then, about these documents, because this is absolutely crucial to understanding this whole issue of possible military dimensions and therefore, to understanding, I would argue, the fate of this accord which was reached in Lausanne.

Because it is, indeed, the possible military dimensions issue which constitutes the biggest threat to reaching an accord. This is the part of the agreement that clearly would take the longest number of years, the longest period of time, and which Iran clearly is afraid would be used by the United States and its Western allies to actually prevent Iran from being able to have the relief from the sanctions that are the primary interest that they have in these negotiations. So that’s why this is so important.

Now, what role did the Israelis play? In my book, I make the case that these documents were fabricated by the Mossad, the international intelligence service of Israel, and that the documents were then passed on to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq [MEK], the exiled Iranian terrorist organization. It’s now gotten off the [U.S. terrorist organizations] list. It’s been given a pass, a get out of jail free card, by the State Department under the Obama administration. But at that time, it was understood to be a terrorist organization, both in the United States and in European countries. And, more importantly, it was known and is well documented to have been a client organization of Israel’s Mossad, having served the purpose of laundering alleged intelligence, purported intelligence, that Israelis did not want to have attributed to the Israeli government, to Mossad.

There are...examples of this that are now well documented, and even documented in a popular book published in Israel, in Hebrew, by a strong supporter of Mossad. It’s a popular history of Mossad’s biggest successful covert operations—one of which, he asserts, and says he has the evidence to support it, was these documents, which were passed on to the IAEA ultimately, through this chain, but which he says the Mujahedin-e-Khalq got from Mossad. He doesn’t claim that all the documents came from Mossad, but he does claim that some of those documents definitely came from Mossad.

So that is the sort of the chain of custody that I reconstruct in my book. The evidence that the documents came from Israel— there’s no smoking gun in the person of a former Mossad whistleblower that I can point to, but I can point to, and I do quote, a former German foreign office official, a senior foreign office official, who gave me an interview on the record saying that he knew for a fact, because he was told by senior officials of the German intelligence service, that those documents did come from Mujahedin-e-Khalq. They did not come from some former Iranian engineer or scientist who was part of this supposed Iranian covert nuclear weapons program.

That was the story that had been passed on to the news media, as well as to the IAEA, by Bush administration officials. So that’s the first piece of evidence.

The second piece of evidence is that these documents were just part of a series of handovers of documents by the Israelis to the IAEA. There was a second series of documents that were given by the Israelis to the IAEA beginning in 2008 and continuing through 2009. We know this because former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei specifically states this in his book, based on his own knowledge of what was going on when he was there in 2008 and 2009, before he retired from the agency. The very interesting fact is despite Mohamed ElBaradei’s telling all of these through his memoirs, no mainstream news source has ever reported that any of these documents, which were later featured by the IAEA in a report in November 2011, came from Israel. This fact has always been covered up by the news media.

I’m the only journalist who has ever reported—every time I write about these documents, I always point out the evidence that they came from Israel, including ElBaradei’s own experience in his memoirs. But the IAEA itself has never acknowledged that the documents came from Israelis in its reports. This has never been mentioned. It’s never been mentioned in the news media.

The argument has always been that the source of the documents had to be kept secret because it would reveal sources and methods. This is the usual intelligence speak for not providing any information about where the source originated, what the original source was.

But of course this doesn’t apply at the international level. This is an entirely different level. The rule obviously should be different, because the world’s public has a right to know in making their own judgment about the credibility of these documents—where they originated, what was the source. If they came from Israel, as ElBa-

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radei said they did, then clearly these documents reflect the national interest of the Israelis.

They should be scrutinized with extraordinary care, rather than being assumed to be authentic.

So that’s the second one.

The other point that I want to make about authenticity is that the IAEA during the ElBaradei regime, when he was director general, did not believe that those documents were authentic. They believed that they were fabricated. I know that for a fact from a former senior IAEA official who, off the record, was not willing to be quoted, told me that they understood that these documents not only have not been authenticated, but they were probably not authentic for a variety of reasons. Clearly, he distrusted those documents, and he acknowledged ElBaradei felt the same way.

There’s a final point that I want to make. And that is that, for all kinds of reasons, it’s clear that the second series of documents— there are linkages between what is claimed in these documents and information that we can definitely attribute to the Israeli government. For one thing, the Israeli government leaked to Israeli journalists in 2011 that they in fact had provided most of the important documents that the IAEA was using to indict Iran.

The final thing, the point I want to make, is that if you go back to 2003 to 2004, there is a very important set of trips that John Bolton, who was the Bush administration’s point man both on weapons of mass destruction as well as on Iran and on Israel. He made a series of trips to Israel, at least some of which were not authorized. I believe none of them were authorized by the regional bureau of the State Department, which is absolutely firm practice, a rule of the State Department, that a senior official wanting to visit a country must get the approval of the regional bureau to visit that country. That approval was never given by the bureau on the Middle East and South Asia in the State Department.

And during some of those visits, we know from testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Bolton was being nominated to be the ambassador to the United Nations, that he met secretly with the head of Mossad. Now, one of those trips was in June of 2003. A few weeks later, within a matter of weeks, we know from a journalist who had no axe to grind on this—and they’re certainly not anti-Israeli, they are far more supportive of Israel than the usual journalist—we know that Mossad set up a new office that summer of 2003, the explicit purpose of which was to influence the opinions of the world’s press and governments about the Iranian nuclear program. And it was during the period from the summer of

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2003 to mid-2004 when these documents were clearly being fabricated.

Now, I’m running out of time, but I just want to add that I also in my book have an analysis showing how these documents could not possibly be authentic, because key points in the documents, particularly the drawings of the Shahab-3 Iranian missile, which is supposedly shown as efforts to integrate a nuclear weapon into the nose cone of the missile—the drawings showed the wrong missile. It shows the earlier version of that missile, which the Iranians had already abandoned in the year 2000, and had begun to redesign it, which was known. It was known that the Iranians were redesigning the missile.

What was not known was that the nose cone of that missile— the re-entry vehicle—would look completely different. It was only in July-August 2004 that foreign intelligence agencies for the first time knew that the nose cone did not resemble the original one. So these documents were fabricated by someone who was not in the Iranian government, who was not aware of what their plan was for their development of that missile, redesigning the missile. It was fabricated by a foreign entity that did not know what was going on until it was too late, until these documents were on their way to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq and thus, through this chain, to the IAEA. So, just in conclusion, what I want to impress upon you is the importance of these fabricated documents and the role of Israel in the current problem of negotiating with the Iranians—a deal that will halt because of these documents that constitute the most difficult part of that deal, a part that the Obama administration continues to say they’re going to insist that the Iranians must explain, must give an account of these documents that is acceptable to the IAEA. The Iranians obviously have been arguing from the beginning, well, these are fabricated documents. What do you expect us to say? What do you expect us to do? But they’re going to give us access. I’ve been told by an Iranian source that they will give the access that the IAEA asked for, but that they’re not going to be held accountable for explaining these in a way that corresponds to the position of the Western governments or to the position that the IAEA has taken in the past.

And that is a potential crisis within the negotiations which we still don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out. And I hope that it will, in fact, be resolved. But I think that it is the most dangerous part of the situation at this point.

Thank you very much. ■ The Israel Lobby Conference

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PAneL 6: Is there an Iraq-Iran Continuum?

The Iran Nuclear Deal Reza Marashi

Photo sue thomPson

Moderator Dale Sprusansky: With that history in mind, we now advance to the current happenings with Iran and the nuclear deal. For that, we turn to Reza Marashi, who is the research director from NIAC, National Iranian American Council. Before joining NIAC four years ago, he was with the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs. He’s a commentator all over the place these days. If you have a TV, you’ve probably seen him. He’s logged many hours over in Europe covering the talks. He will give us the latest update on the nuclear talks.

Reza Marashi: Thank you very much. I appreciate that kind introduction. Thank you all for coming. Hopefully, talking about Iran at the end of the day is a nice change of pace. Because as I looked at the agenda and followed the interesting stuff you guys were talking about before the Iran panel came up, it looked like it ran the gamut. Let’s spice things up. Let’s talk about Iran a little bit, which, in theory, is completely separate from a lot of the stuff that you guys were talking about over the course of the day. In reality, nothing in the Middle East is ever really separate from one another. It’s one big dirty, nasty, beautiful mess, so let’s try to unpack this particular part of that mess as best we can. The reality of this situation here is that there’s absolutely no way to cover the Iran nuclear deal in the amount of time that I’ve been allotted. It would take an entire panel, an entire conference just to discuss this one particular issue. That’s actually kind of sad.

But the saving grace is that I’m going to give you what I think are the three most important and three most digestible bits related to this expansive topic. Then I’m hoping that once we get to the Q&A portion, you can ask questions. My two colleagues and I will do our best to answer whatever questions you guys have. We’re operating on the elementary school premise of there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

Why is this deal important? Gareth [Porter] calls it a manufactured crisis. The Iranian foreign minister calls it an unnecessary crisis. I think President Obama is just relieved that he’s one step closer to resolving this crisis. The reality of the situation is we’re talking about what could potentially be the most dangerous

weapons known to man existing inside of Iran in the eyes of some countries.

In the eyes of other countries, including Iran itself, they’ve never had the aspirations to have these weapons. The reality is probably somewhere in between. Rather than talk about the past, I want to talk about what’s going on now and what lies ahead. I think that’s the most interesting thing. That’s what’s most pertinent to hopefully securing a peaceful future.

Why is the Iran nuclear deal important? I think it’s important. You can ask 10 different people. They’ll tell you 10 different things. I think it’s important because the reality of the situation is we are talking about an issue of war and peace. Ladies and gentlemen, it is that simple. It is an issue of war and peace. The reason why it’s an issue of war and peace is because in my view, there are only two ways to solve international problems in the world. You have war and you have diplomacy. Now, the word “solve” here, it is a loosely defined term.

War or diplomacy, that’s what you have. You have two options, right? Everything that happens between war and diplomacy, whether it’s sanctions or secret assassinations or cyberwarfare, and these are all things that happened to Iran’s nuclear program, whether from the United States or allies like Israel or other countries as well. These are all stalling tactics that kick the can down the road and delay the inevitable choice between these two options: war and diplomacy. The dirty little secret that they don’t tell you is that everything that happens before diplomacy, including war, is for leverage to try to stack up as many bargaining chips as you can possibly get because, inevitably, every conflict ends with a negotiation, including war.

Let me give you an example. The Iraq war starts in 2003. Before George W. Bush leaves the White House, he negotiates what’s called a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government that was part of the withdrawal plan that was set for the end of December 2011. President Obama comes into office. For a variety of reasons that we don’t need to get into here, he decides that he might like to extend our troop presence in Iraq beyond the withdrawal date that was set by the Bush administration, Dec. 31, 2011.

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Reza Marashi: The Iran Nuclear Deal

As we start to negotiate with the Iraqis, the government that would not exist if it wasn’t for us going in and invading the country and bombing it in 2003, as we are negotiating with this government, they say, “We don’t mind if your troops stay, but we’re not going to give your troops immunity.” Now, America does not send its troops anywhere unless American troops have immunity from prosecution under the law of that country. That was the Iraqis’ way of basically saying, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, okay?”

How did that war end? It ended with a negotiation. It ended with a negotiation in my view that didn’t go that well for the United States, all things considered. Fast forward to the Iran issue here, and we have successive administrations that, in my view, predate the Bush administration, when this issue really came to the forefront of every newspaper headline in the world. They’re trying to figure out how to deal with this Iran issue. Then, when the nuclear file was put at the forefront of the Iran issue— because let’s not forget, before Iran’s nuclear program was ever reconstituted, before it ever became front-page news—Iran was front-page news because of the hostage crisis and because of a variety of other issues, from terrorism to God knows what else, that we as the United States, and the United States government more specifically, said we find this to be objectionable behavior, right?

Then the nuclear program—because we are talking about what are conceivably the world’s most dangerous weapons—catapulted it to a higher level. Then for reasons that Gareth [Porter] outlined and a whole other variety of reasons, it became an even more tangible issue for not just the average American but especially the DC establishment and folks inside Washington, DC. This is why I think it’s becoming an important issue. It’s this idea of war versus peace.

If we don’t use the diplomatic track to try and resolve this issue peacefully, then the only option that exists is war. It’s not a very popular option amongst the American people, or people in other Western countries for that matter. That is why I think President Obama deserves credit in his second term for being courageous and taking steps that none of his predecessors really had the wherewithal or the courage to take, in my view, in my assessment.

That’s one, okay? War versus peace. At least right now, it looks like the United States of America has chosen peace over war. Two thumbs up, that’s a very good thing.

What actually happened in Switzerland, and what’s been happening in these negotiations over the past 18 months? I’ve had the

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good fortune—or, depending on who you talk to, the burden—of attending almost every round of these negotiations to cover them, to meet with the negotiators, speak with journalists on the ground, etc., etc. I consider it to be the good fortune, because I think what has happened over the past 18 months more generally, and in Lausanne, Switzerland more specifically, I consider this to be historic.

I think it’s historic for two reasons. One, you would be hard pressed to name another agreement of any kind—whether it’s a framework agreement, a finalized deal, or anything in between— that was negotiated by the U.S. and Iran irrespective of whether other countries were a party to it. You’d be hard pressed to find another agreement that was negotiated between these two countries that proved to be ultimately successful. You might find one or two here or there, but certainly nothing of this magnitude. Two countries that would call one another enemies for over three decades were able to sit down at the negotiating table and have a civilized conversation. You could probably count the number of times that’s happened over the past three decades on one hand. For that reason alone, I find it to be historic.

I think it’s even more historic because of the actual tangible things that both sides are getting in this agreement. The compromises that were made are far more reaching than I thought that they would be at this stage of the negotiations, and I think set us up for a successful future going forward to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is verifiably peaceful and that we avoid another war of choice in the Middle East. What stands out to me about what we, as the United States and our allies and the P5+1, or permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, are tangibly getting from this, we’re getting the most intrusive inspections regime of any nuclear program in the world. Iran is going to be signing what’s called the Additional Protocol, which is essentially assuring verification of a higher degree than what Iran currently allows the IAEA to have. I’m summarizing here because I don’t want to go into all the various details of the Additional Protocol and bore you with them.

It’s a very good thing. More inspections and more access to the various aspects of Iran’s nuclear program is a very good thing. Iran is also agreeing to additional transparency measures beyond the Additional Protocol for the life of its program. Meaning that if you hear people go out to the media and say, “Well, this deal is only good for 10 to 15 years and under the sunset clause, all the concessions that Iran’s giving is going away,” it’s nonsense. When this

If we don’t use the diplomatic track to try and resolve this issue peacefully, then the only option that exists is war.

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deal is done, Iran’s nuclear program will continue to be the most heavily inspected nuclear program in the world—period, full stop.

Also, after this deal is signed—if in fact it’s signed, I want to acknowledge that it’s not a foregone conclusion, but I am beyond cautiously optimistic at this point; now, I would just call myself optimistic—the IAEA will be spending more money per year of its budget on Iran than any other country.

If I’m not mistaken—and somebody in this room, I’m sure, can correct me if I’m wrong—I think only the South Korean program or the Japanese program, either/or, gets more money allocated towards inspections and things of that nature from the IAEA than Iran’s program. That will change. Iran will be the most heavily inspected, it will have the most resources directed towards it. This is very, very good, because the essence of this is that every aspect of the supply chain in Iran’s nuclear program is going to be monitored, inspected and verified. In layman’s terms, that means we’re going to know what Iran is doing every step of the way.

Another perk is that the majority of Iran’s enrichment—actually all of Iran’s enrichment, let’s be honest—is going to be happening in one facility with slightly over 5,000 first-generation centrifuges, technology that’s over 30 years old. So to a certain extent, a very large aspect of Iran’s nuclear program is going to be essentially frozen in time.

Even if they’re able to make advancements on the research and development of various technical aspects of their program, they’re not going to be able to go and test it in the real world. Doing things in labs and doing things in the real world and testing it for real world viability and functionality are two very different things, right?

Iranian scientists will continue to be employed and will be able to continue making progress on what they consider to be important aspects of research and development of their nuclear program.

But the real world application of Iran’s scientific advancement is not going to be actually operationalized in ways that present a proliferation threat to the United States and its allies in the world. This is a very good thing.

Also, two of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the fundamental infrastructure of them, are going to be changed. What was going to be a plutonium facility is essentially having the heart taken out of it. It’s going to be reconfigured completely, two thumbs up. Then Iran’s underground facility called Fordow will be allowed to have 1,000 centrifuges to continue spinning. But they’re not going to be spinning uranium. You have the energy secretary of the United States, Ernest Moniz, who’s a nuclear physicist, MIT-trained, going on

television and saying because Iran has 1,000 centrifuges in this facility that are not spinning uranium anymore, this reduces the proliferation throughout, if not outright eliminates it. Again, tangible compromises that were achieved in this framework agreement dramatically improve our ability to verify that Iran’s program remains peaceful. This is a very, very good thing.

Obviously, we have given concessions as well when it comes to sanctions relief and number of centrifuges, even though the number of centrifuges isn’t the only, or by any case of the imagination, the most pertinent aspect of Iran’s nuclear program. But I want to point out to you here what the United States is getting, because we have a propensity in the American media to point out what America is giving. I think that what we are getting out of this deal is absolutely tremendous. It’s more than I thought we would get. It’s more than what most people in Washington, DC thought would be agreed to at this point in time. Overwhelmingly, this is a good thing for security.

Now, the last bit I want to talk about is—if in fact this deal proves to be successful, which I am optimistic that it will be—why is this a good thing for regional security? The Middle East is on fire. I think Iran is really the only country in the region that I could think of right now that isn’t actively fighting a war.

You could even say that they are—because they’re in Syria.

Really, at the end of the day, you have every Middle Eastern country fighting a war in some way, shape, or form. That’s not really a good thing. If this crisis over Iran’s nuclear program can be solved and if it can be taken off of the ledger, taken off of the balance sheet, what that provides in terms of opportunities is unprecedented. It provides an opportunity for Iran and the United States to use the nuclear agreement as a foundation to have conversations about regional security issues from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria to Yemen. If you can name a regional security problem in the Middle East, chances are Iran and the United States have not been talking about it in any substantial way for at least a decade, if not longer.

If you talk to political officials in Tehran, you talk to political officials in Washington, they tell you either, “We don’t want to talk about it.” This is the minority of people. Or the majority of people say, “We’d like to talk about it, but this nuclear issue is the 8,000pound gorilla in the room. And it’s preventing us from having the political space that’s necessary to address these issues.” I’m of the opinion that it frees up space in Tehran and in Washington to have a conversation that frankly is long overdue about: a) whether or not our interests overlap tactically or strategically. I’m of the opinion that they do in more than one area, but not every single

More inspections and more access to Iran’s nuclear program is a very good thing.

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Paul Pillar: AIPAC/Netanyahu Objectives Regarding the Iranian Nuclear Issue

area, in the Middle East. If Iran is brought into these conversations, it could help find political solutions to problems that frankly haven’t been able to be solved because Iran hasn’t been at the table.

Ladies and gentlemen, durable solutions to any major conflict require the buy-in of every country with the capacity to wreck the solution. If Iran has the capacity to wreck a political solution in Syria or with regards to Israel-Palestine or in Yemen or Iraq, then they have to be brought to the table and engaged if in fact you’re trying to find a political solution. We’ve been trying for over two decades, if not longer, to work around Iran, to isolate Iran, to prevent it from being at the table. It hasn’t worked. Here’s another point where I give the Obama administration credit. They realize that this is, in fact, the case. I’m of the opinion that they’re willing to test the propositions of having these conversations with the Iranians in an effort to try and build a better future in the Middle East and solve problems peacefully, rather than dropping bombs and firing bullets.

The last thing that I’ll say—because this little timer here says that I have two and a half minutes—is that there are spoilers that are trying to get in the way. Naturally, we have a hostile Congress to really anything that President Obama is trying to accomplish, foreign or domestic policy. They’re going to be pushing hard and trying to torpedo the gains that were made in Switzerland and prevent either a final deal from being signed or to prevent the United States from fulfilling whatever obligations it signs onto in any final deal. That includes AIPAC. That includes the Israeli government.

That includes the Saudis. That includes Gulf Cooperation Council countries. But to the Obama administration’s credit, again, they

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are reaching out to each of these actors and trying really hard to prevent them from doing so. Some might even say they’re fighting to protect the political investment that they’ve made that the vast majority of Americans support them making.

In that sense, we do have a fight on our hands. But this is a fight that I think the president is willing to fight demonstrably. This is something that the president is making an investment in now, in ways that he certainly did not during the first term of his presidency. I think that while there is still risk involved, the president and the White House have a good strategy in front of them. It is a higher likelihood that they’ll win than they will lose. But I want to emphasize to you that creating the political space that’s necessary for the White House to do the kinds of things that I think everybody in this room would like the White House to do requires citizens, interest groups, you name it, across the board to be active and to create the political space for them. It’s not the White House’s job to create the political space for you and me. It is the job of interested citizens, interest groups, think tanks—you name it—to create the political space for the White House.

If people like you and I lead, I think you have a willingness in the White House to follow. Let that be a message, if nothing else resonates with you going forward, not just on the Iran issue but frankly any other issue. Politicians are only as brave as constituencies who are willing to support them in their next election. Let me stop there. Thanks for listening. I appreciate it.

Moderator Dale Sprusansky: In 18 minutes, that’s about as strong a case as you can make for the nuclear talks. ■

AIPAC/Netanyahu Objectives Regarding the Iranian Nuclear Issue Paul Pillar

Moderator Dale Sprusansky: Dr. Paul Pillar is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Center for Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. In 2005, he retired from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. He will discuss AIPAC and Netanyahu’s objectives and the American interest.

Paul Pillar: Well, good afternoon. And for those of you who have been sitting all day, to the very last speaker of the very last panel, congratulations.

The campaign to kill an agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program has certainly been one of the biggest efforts by the Israeli

government and its lobby here in the United States to influence U.S. policies—certainly the biggest on any issue that does not relate specifically to U.S.-Israeli relations or matters on which Israel is directly involved, like the Palestinian problem.

The nature and purpose of the campaign are worthy of attention, I think, for at least two reasons. One is the importance of the agreement itself, for all the reasons that Reza [Marashi] just outlined. It behooves us to understand why such an agreement, which is so much in U.S. interests, is being opposed. And some of the reasons are to be found, as Reza hinted, in domestic U.S. politics right here. That is to say, people in Congress and elsewhere who want to deny Barack Obama any kind of achievement, The Israel Lobby Conference

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either foreign or domestic. But it’s obvious that the most energetic and persistent agitation against the agreement has come from the current government of Israel, and thus also from that government’s lobby here in Washington.

The other reason for studying the basis for the anti-agreement campaign is to observe what that demonstrates more broadly about Israeli motivations and intentions as they relate to U.S. interests.

The starting point for understanding those motivations is to ask why, if an Iranian nuclear weapon is as fearsome a prospect as it is said to be, that the Israeli government has been opposing, rather than supporting, an agreement whose very purpose is to place severe restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program, to subject it to an unprecedented degree of intrusive international inspection, and to keep it peaceful.

The alternative to this laboriously negotiated agreement, after all, would be no agreement at all, which would mean Iran would not be subject to any special restrictions on its nuclear program, none of the special intrusive inspections that Reza described, nothing beyond the general obligations it would have as a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

If an Iranian nuke is the worry, in other words, then sabotaging the negotiations and opposing the agreement that emerges from them simply makes no sense.

Now we’ve heard, of course, including from the Israeli prime minister, the notion of getting a “better deal.” But let’s give the prime minister credit to be smart enough to realize that there is not going to be a better deal than what is emerging from the current negotiations. Once all the details are laboriously hammered out over these next two and a half months, the negotiations will have been going on for the better part of two years, consuming enormous time and attention of our secretary of state, other foreign ministers, other senior officials, and with the Obama administration taking very firm stands on matters such as uranium enrichment capabilities. The deal that emerges will be the best one that can be gotten, and Mr. Netanyahu knows that. Besides, we’ve already seen from past experience what happens when the United States turns away from a possible agreement with Iran, turns the sanctions screws tighter, and hopes for some kind of Iranian capitulation and crying uncle. The Iranians’ response has instead been to expand and advance their nuclear program, which has been the basic story over the past 10 to 15 years. We might also note that Mr. Netanyahu’s track record of moving the goalposts on this sub-

ject gives us a strong basis for concluding that he would not support any agreement with Iran no matter what the terms.

There is, to be sure, genuine concern and even fear among many sincere Israelis about a possible Iranian nuclear weapon, notwithstanding the strategic fact of Israel having the wherewithal to destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran in retaliation if Iran ever really did try, with what still would be far lesser capabilities than Israel’s, to inflict lethal harm on Israel. But such fear is what has led a politician such as Mr. Netanyahu to develop a political strategy largely centered on exploiting that fear. And, of course, when you exploit a fear it exacerbates it even more. But even allowing for a large emotive element in how ordinary Israelis think and feel about this subject, it still makes no sense to oppose negotiation of an agreement explicitly designed to assure that the Iranian program stays peaceful. The reasons for the Israeli government’s opposition to the negotiations and to the agreement have to be found elsewhere.

Finding those reasons requires thinking more broadly about some of the follow-on political and diplomatic effects of the United States and its P5+1 negotiating partners striking a nuclear deal with Iran. And again, we should give the Israeli prime minister and other Israelis credit for being smart enough to understand those effects. A nuclear agreement represents a partial breaking of diplomatic ice, especially in U.S.-Iranian relations. Recall that only a couple of years ago, U.S. and Iranian officials weren’t even talking to each other. It is a step toward Iran getting partly out of the international penalty box. It won’t get entirely out of that box, and there are plenty of other issues besides the nuclear one that are reasons for sanctions that have been placed on Iran and that would remain in place. But a nuclear deal would entail partial relief from Iran’s pariah status. And that has several implications of interest to Israel, and specifically to the Israeli government.

One is that it will make Iran a less fettered, less restricted competitor with Israel for regional influence than it has been so far. As the second most populous country in the region, Iran, and specifically an unshackled Iran, would be unsurprisingly—and quite legitimately, I might add—a major player in any contest for influence in the Middle East. It already is a major player, but it would be an even less restricted one than it is now.

In seeking to win friends and influence people, Israel and Iran are not always appealing to the same constituencies, but sometimes they are. They’re doing so in the Gulf Arab countries. One

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Paul Pillar: AIPAC/Netanyahu Objectives Regarding the Iranian Nuclear Issue

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specific likely consequence of the partial unshackling of Iran will be a new rapprochement between Iran and the Gulf Arab countries, with some steps toward that end, such as some high-level visits, having already taken place in recent months, probably in anticipation of completion of the nuclear deal. Any such ArabIranian rapprochement makes it harder for Israel to present itself as an invaluable partner in opposing the Iranian menace on behalf of everyone else in the region.

Not only will Iran be a formidable competitor for influence in terms of size and weight; it also is one that will continue to be not at all shy about criticizing Israeli policy. It will be less restrained in that respect, as long as the Palestinian issue remains unresolved, than the Gulf Arabs are, with their unspoken limits on castigating Israel that accompany the Gulf Arabs’ close security relations with the United States.

A second implication of an agreement is that Iran as a threat that is a focus of, and one of the rationales for, a very close U.S.-Israeli security partnership will fade somewhat. It is not, of course, the only focus and rationale for that relationship, but it is one that is especially congenial to the way the Israelis like to describe the lines of conflict in the Middle East: it’s Iran against everybody else.

Third, the completion of a complicated and important agreement between Tehran and Washington and its Western partners, and the opening that this will provide to Washington and Tehran doing worthwhile business on other matters, as Reza suggested, where their interests happen to overlap, at least partially, challenges the Israeli mantra that Israel is the only reliable and worthwhile partner that the United States has in the Middle East. Now, Israeli fears about just how much of a challenge this will be I think are perhaps somewhat exaggerated. Iran is not about to become a U.S. ally, and there’s not even the prospect, in my judgment, of full diplomatic relations being restored between Washington and Tehran any time soon. But the claim to being the “only” this or the “only” that is an important rationale for Israel in trying to justify the extraordinary relationship with the United States that it has enjoyed.

Another of those “only” claims, of course, has been that Israel is the only democracy in the region. Netanyahu’s government may realize that this claim, too, is wearing somewhat thin, with the prime minister having made explicit his determination to hold on to the occupied territories and his biggest financial backer, Sheldon Adelson, saying, “Israel won’t be a democratic state— who cares?” Iran, despite all of its considerable democratic defi-

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ciencies, such as the vetting of candidates by the Guardian Council and the idiosyncratic role of the Supreme Leader, at least does not have a large subject population with no political rights at all, as is the case, of course, with the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Bearing that in mind, I think it’s fair to say that taking the greater Middle East as our framework, that the overall level of democracy in Israel and Iran these days can be considered about the same, although at the moment both are probably behind Tunisia.

A fourth implication, in many ways the most important one in the eyes of the Israeli government, is that any easing of tension with Iran erodes the role of Iran as an all-purpose bê te noire that serves to distract international attention from whatever Israeli leaders would rather not talk about, and from anything that the international community would rightly see as a problem largely of Israel’s own making.

The main subject to be distracted from, of course, is the continued Israeli hold on occupied territory and the failure to resolve the Palestinian issue. A response that the Netanyahu government has repeatedly and immediately made whenever this subject is raised is to say that the “real” problem in the region is Iran, and especially its nuclear program, and that’s what everybody ought to be talking about instead. A successful agreement restricting that program and leading to generally better international relations with Iran will make it harder for the Israeli government to keep using that distracting device.

The Israeli government is motivated by a desire to avoid all of these consequences of a nuclear agreement with Iran and of the resulting improvement in Iran’s relations with the rest of the world, and especially with the United States. This motivation provides the only plausible interpretation of Israeli behavior and posturing on the Iranian nuclear issue, including the unrelenting effort to sabotage negotiations with Tehran on the subject. The motivation certainly provides a much more plausible explanation of that behavior than the simple fear of an Iranian nuke.

The Israeli government’s objective in this regard is not shared with the United States, and in some respects is directly contrary to U.S. interests. The United States does not have an interest in taking sides in intra-regional contests for influence, in which each contestant is pursuing its own parochial narrow interests, be they sectarian-based or anything else. The United States does have an interest in using diplomacy, freely and flexibly, in any way it sees fit, and with any foreign interlocutor it wants, to pursue its own objec-

Any easing of tension with Iran erodes the role of Iran as an all-purpose bête noire.

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tives. It is contrary to U.S. interests to allow any one foreign regime to prevent the United States from doing business with any other foreign regime it may be worthwhile to do business with. And it is certainly not in U.S. interests to give Israel any further rhetorical tools to help it put off indefinitely any resolution of the Palestinian issue.

Binyamin Netanyahu has devoted a lot of rhetorical effort to the idea that the United States shares interests with Israel regarding this Iranian nuclear issue. That effort has included false statements about supposed Iranian ICBMs—there’s no Iranian ICBM—and

silly parodies on beer commercials in which he has told us, “This bomb’s for you.” The U.S. and Israel do share an interest in there not being an Iranian nuclear weapon—that’s what this agreement is all about, and that’s why the Obama administration is pursing it.

But the Netanyahu government’s behavior, in which it is attempting to torpedo an agreement that would help to ensure that there will be no such Iranian weapon, is directly contrary to U.S. interests.

Thanks, and I look forward to the discussion. ■

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS Moderator Dale Sprusansky: We are running on borrowed time right now. Everyone has a few question cards in front of them.

Maybe if we’ll just go down the line, choose your best questions and give us your thoughts, and don’t take that long.

Gareth Porter: I have the good fortune of having the same question submitted by three different people. I’m really happy that three people thought of this question because it does in fact represent an extremely important point, which I had wanted to talk about and ended up not doing. In fact, I’ve prepared an entire different presentation which did deal with this question.

The question is, in effect, “is or isn’t the nuclear issue a distraction posed by the Israelis from the Palestinian issue?” In my alternative presentation, which I did write up, I make the point that not only is the Israeli demonization of Iran, which has been going on now ever since the early 1990s, since 1993, beginning with the [Yitzhak] Rabin administration or Rabin government, this demonization campaign has just been continuous ever since then. One of the themes of that demonization campaign has been that Iran is an existential threat. That’s one of the primary themes, an existential threat to Israel. That idea has been propounded by every single Israeli government since Rabin, and at least on three occasions, two of which are associated with Mr. Netanyahu. But there’s no question that this argument was in a large part to indeed distract attention from or to promote a policy toward the Palestinian issue. If you go back to the Rabin government, he actually created the idea of the existential threat to Israel from Iran in order to justify his policy of negotiations with the PLO beginning in 1993. One of the interesting things that I’ve learned about Rabin’s policy is that he originally started talking about the threat of nuclear weapons in the Middle East after he was elected in mid-1992. But he talked about Arab regimes—particularly, of course, thinking of Iraq—he didn’t talk about Iran.

It was not until he actually met with Bill Clinton in late 1992 during Clinton’s presidential campaign, when Clinton apparently voiced the very, very hard line toward Iran, which he believed would be popular with funders who he was appealing to in the United States as the pro-Israel candidate. It was only after Clinton was elected that Rabin started talking about an existential threat from Iran. And so the point being that there is a reciprocal relationship here between the Israeli use of the existential threat from Iran politically and their enablers in the United States. In this case, Clinton wanting to run as the pro-Israel candidate, again in order—presumably, although I can’t document this—to make sure that he had very strong support from funders as well as getting the Jewish vote.

But the point about Netanyahu is that on two occasions, he used the existential threat from Iran in order to ward off pressure from the United States to change his policy to become more forthcoming with regard to the Oslo process, the peace process. He started doing that in 1997 very explicitly. He started talking about the existential threat precisely when he needed to prevent the Clinton administration from putting pressure on him or soften any diplomatic pressure from the Clinton administration to carry out the agreements that had been already reached by the Israeli government with the Palestinians.

So there’s no question that that has been a fundamental policy of Israel—to use the supposed Iranian threat as a justification or a way of avoiding the serious negotiations and accommodating the rights of the Palestinians. He did it again in 2012 quite explicitly when he started talking about Hamas equals Iran. It was a way of making his domestic problems with the Palestinians an issue of the threat from Iran—which of course by that time, as I talked about earlier, was a major success that Israel had been able to achieve politically and diplomatically, to create this idea of Iran as a nuclear threat.

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Reza Marashi: Okay. I have a couple of questions that I’m just going to fly through here very quickly. Fortunately, sometimes you get duplicates as Gareth [Porter] pointed out. I’ll start with the duplicate question. “Today’s Washington Post indicates that Iran will not agree to or sign a deal unless all sanctions are lifted.

What’s the prospect of a final deal with Iran given [Ali Hosseini] Khamenei’s denunciation today on the front page of The Washington Post?”

I think there is an unfortunate propensity to take what the supreme leader says word for word at face value. I think like any politician that gives a speech, you kind of have to delve in there and connect the dots in terms of what he’s saying with what’s actually happening in the world.

In the exact same speech, he said that if we resolve the nuclear issue, it could in fact allow for conversations with the United States on regional security issues, which is something that a lot of people in this town said he would never approve.

So I do think that he came out and said all sanctions should be lifted immediately, but I don’t think that’s his actual position. I think there is a bit of posturing, and I think that there is a bit of spin going on. I think the Iranians realized that it is not possible for American sanctions to be lifted upon signature of a nuclear deal. Congress isn’t going to do that. So I think that there’s going to be a mutually acceptable process that’s put into place where it will be step by step. It will be based on reciprocity and it will be decided in advance, the steps that the P5+1 and Iran will take at the same time. Tit for tat, who gets what, when. That will all be sorted out in due course.

Don’t get me wrong. There will be a lot of haggling over this particular point between now and the end of June when a final deal is supposed to get done. There will be a lot of brinkmanship, but I don’t think that it’s going to be an insurmountable obstacle by any stretch of the imagination. Because if nothing else, it’s important to remember that every single compromise, concession, call it what you will, that the Iranians have made up to this point in these negotiations was approved in advance by the supreme leader. The Iranian negotiators are not free-lancing. They’re running everything by the supreme leader. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is the supreme leader’s personal rep[resentative] at these negotiations. I think we’re in good shape when it comes to that particular point.

The next question: “Any chance that major powers will demand the same monitoring controls for the Israeli nuclear industry?

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

79

Double standards is a major problem.” No, that’s unfortunately not going to happen. Not that I don’t want it to happen. I think it would be great if it happened. I’m just being realistic. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to see that anytime soon. But it should happen, in my humble opinion.

The next question: “You said that nothing in the Middle East is separate. Despite nearly seven decades of suffering and human rights violations, Palestine was never able to get the U.S. to stand up to Israel. Why do you think the U.S. has been more willing to talk to and negotiate with Iran?”

I think it became an issue of war and peace as it relates to Iran.

In a cycle of mutual escalation—where sanctions, cyberwarfare, secret assassinations on our side, and then Iranian bombing campaigns against Israelis around the world, systematically advancing the technical aspects of their nuclear program, 20,000 centrifuges from over the past 10 to 15 years—both sides were running out of escalatory options that were short of what would essentially be a tripwire to war.

It’s kind of like those old James Dean movies, where the two cars are driving towards the end of the cliff playing the game of “chicken” to see who will pump on the brakes first. Fortunately, they both hit the brakes at the same time, and that’s luck.

I don’t even believe in luck. I think luck is for losers, but frankly we got lucky, okay? This was not a strategic decision on the part of the United States or the Iranians. It was just cooler heads prevailed. That doesn’t happen often when we’re talking about our world more generally or the Middle East more specifically, which is why I’m calling it blind luck.

As it pertains to mistreatment of Palestinians and America’s unwillingness to stand up to Israel, I think it was Harry Truman who compared the amount of Zionists that he has as constituents versus the lack of Arabs that he has as constituents. I don’t remember the exact quote, but the reality of the situation is that domestic political constraints in the United States have a propensity to dictate the positions that a lot of our elected officials take on this one very emotionally and politically charged issue. Love it or hate it, Jewish Americans are extremely well organized politically in the United States of America. Until we have equally organized minority groups that perhaps have a difference of opinion on how these policies should play out as it pertains to the United States involvement, I just don’t see a viable way for this to shift. But the fact that you’re all here right now I think speaks volumes to the fact that it is, in fact, possible.

From Israel’s own standpoint it would make a lot of sense to bring their widely supected [nuclear] program out of the closet.

The Israel Lobby Conference

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PANEL 6: Is There an Iraq-Iran Continuum?

The last thing that I would say as it relates to these questions.

“Will [Iran] accept the deal with [the U.S.] unless all sanctions end? What about inspections of military installations?” I think I covered the sanctions bit. They’ll sort out a mutually acceptable way to get the sanctions terminated and then allow for the constraints on Iranian programs in a reciprocal manner. You don’t get this far in the process to let it blow up over minutiae. It is not to say that minutiae aren’t important, because the devil is definitely in the details. But I just don’t think it blows up at this point.

I think it’s kind of like the banks in 2008; it’s too big to fail.

Inspections of military installations…It depends on what the military installation is. The International Atomic Energy Agency has had that access to some military sites in the past. If there is just cause to visit military sites in the future, I don’t think that there will be a problem on the part of the Iranian end to allow those visits. But what I don’t think the Iranians will agree to is allowing the IAEA to say, hey, you have a military site, we want to visit it. The Iranians will say, why? And then the IAEA says, because. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I’d like to think that there is a grey area or a middle ground, if you will, that the two sides can agree on. In fact, I think that they actually will end up agreeing on a middle ground. Because again, the amount of compromise and concessions that both sides have made at this point are so massive that to backtrack and to let it fall apart now would be a failure of epic proportions.

Paul Pillar: All of the questions I was given are basically on the same topic. To quote one of the cards, “Why does no one bring up: (1) Israel’s nuclear program, (2) the fact that Israel has not been inspected by the IAEA, and (3) that Israel has never signed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?” The U.S. government, as a matter of policy, has never pronounced on this topic.

I will follow the prescribed rules and refer to Israel’s widely suspected nuclear weapons arsenal. In the writings of Abner Cohen, who is the foremost historian of Israel’s widely suspected nuclear

weapons program—he’s written a couple of books on this subject—has, among others, described the origins of this.

It goes back to the time of Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, in the earliest phases of Israel’s widely suspected program, in which the basic deal that was struck was that the U.S. government would not make a stink about the program as long as the Israelis did not publicly acknowledge it and thus make it a huge foreign policy problem for the Nixon administration. That continues to be the policy through several administrations. I think just through longevity and the fact that it has gone through several Republican and Democratic administrations, for the U.S. to depart from that policy would be seen as a huge step. It would be seen by would-be supporters of Israel in this country of the ilk that we’re talking about in this conference, [as] a big blow against Israel and a huge compromise to the special relationship.

You certainly won’t get any argument from me that it would be very wise to take that step. Indeed, Abner Cohen, he had an article in Foreign Affairs awhile back, and the other scholars had made this point, that from Israel’s own standpoint it would make sense to bring their widely suspected program out of the closet. Among other things, it would enable more open and worthwhile talks between U.S. and Israeli officials about security cooperation that really matters and that sort of thing.

But like Reza [Marashi], I don’t expect this is going to happen anytime soon. I would not rule it out entirely if over the next two years, in response to Israeli government continued attempts to do everything it can to sabotage or defeat the nuclear agreement, if the Obama administration in its closing months really wanted to play hardball, this is one thing they could have on their list of options, to finally change the policy that Nixon set over 40 years ago. But again, I’m not going to hold my breath.

Moderator Dale Sprusansky: That was an exciting panel and a good way to end our day today. If everyone would remain seated for just a few seconds—Delinda Hanley and Grant Smith have some final thoughts. ■

Grant Smith: We have a half-hour recap. [Laughter] No. We just wanted to thank everybody, myself on behalf of IRmep.

Please come and visit our website and sign up for our e-mail list. We hope you’ll fill out the survey that is coming your way probably next week.

knot, improve our nation’s policies and align them more with American core values.

And I really want to give a shout-out to Grant Smith who has been working—his whole family has been working for months.

No one could do a conference without this man. Keep your eye on the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy.

Delinda Hanley: We really thank you for joining us as we examined the knot that binds—or even strangles—the United States and Israel. Let’s continue to work together to untie this

Grant Smith: Thank you everybody.

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs–Special Supplement

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