WASHINGTON, April 24 (UPI) -- American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby called the 700-pound gorilla in Capitol Hill, is flexing its muscles for a new political drive on behalf of the Jewish state.
Its clout appears to be growing.
As Israel faces a grim escalating conflict with the Palestinians and the threat of the Arab world rallying behind them, American Jewry is closing its ranks, too. The mighty, long-respected and feared AIPAC, held its annual policy conference at Washington's Hilton Hotel on Connecticut Avenue Sunday through Tuesday and while the mood was far from cheerful, the organization displayed even more grassroots support and influence in Washington than in recent years.
The dramatic highlight of the annual three-day conference is always choreographed to be its Monday night banquet when every member of Congress and the current administration attended it is honored by name and personal applause. The real intent of the ceremony, of course, is to serve notice to Israel's friends and enemies alike in Washington and around the world about the political influence AIPAC welds.
The number of senators, congressmen and administration officials is always clearly watched that a thermometer in a heat wave. And this year it was way, way up.
Half the hundred members of the United States Senate turned up in person. So did 90 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, more than one fifth of them. And 13 senior Bush administration officials turned up, led by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card
The conference was also overbooked. Five-thousand delegates turned up -- almost twice as many as last year. And the organization's annual budget at $412 million, with 140 full-time employees continues to dwarf the clout and effectiveness of any other foreign policy lobby in the United States. Fortune magazine, in its most recent survey, concluded that AIPAC was the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington and by far the dominant foreign policy one.
The star speakers at the conference reflected AIPAC's continuing clout. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was due to speak but did not appear. (Perhaps not coincidentally, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the highest-ranking Jew in the Bush administration, was booed at the pro-Israel rally on Capitol Hill last week.) However, Rumsfeld was replaced by an even more significant figure in domestic U.S. policy terms, White House chief of staff Card who reiterated to loud applause his boss's determination to safeguard the Jewish state.
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, the tough, fundamentalist Christian right winger who is the real leader of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, addressed the conference. So did Senate Majority Leader Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who leads the dominant Democrats there. Both are long-time supporters of Israel.
Where does such political clout come from? It is not based on the demographic power of American Jewry. About 8 million Americans are ethnically Jewish but fewer than half of them are affiliated to any Jewish religious or secular organization sand the rate of intermarriage and assimilation into the general population is high.
But American Jews are among the wealthiest per capita ethnic groups in America and an exceptionally politically active one. AIPAC's real power lies in its monitoring and assessments of the pro or anti-Israel voting records of members of Congress and on the assessments of these records that it publishes.
They are read closely by Political Action Committee members all across the United States and are widely believed to be instrumental in channeling floods of money from the supporters of Israel into the political campaign coffers of sympathetic congressmen and candidates.
At the same time, negative assessments by AIPAC are believed to be sufficient to lead to tidal waves of money flowing into the campaign chests of challengers to those who defy the lobby and its cause.
This power may well be exaggerated. AIPAC officials take pains to argue in public that their real influence comes from their -- undoubted -- skill in championing strong U.S. support for Israel. But what matters most of all is that belief in this power is widely held across the political spectrum.
James Zogby, the skilful and widely respected head of the Arab American Institute in Washington, estimates that around 80 members of Congress are much more sympathetic at heart to the Palestinian/Arab cause than to the Israeli one, but that must of them are too inhibited by the perception of the pro-Israel lobby's power to publicly say so.
AIPAC is not just sitting on this political clout. It is using it. The lobby's executive director, Howard Kohr, in his speech to the conference Monday announced a new push on Capitol, Hill to intensify pressure -- especially from the pro-Israel Republican Right -- on President George W. Bush to cease protecting Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and seeking to restrain Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Kohr also announced a new drive to push through a series of new congressional measures to help Israel. Bills introduced the week before the conference, he noted, were aimed at boosting U.S., aid to Israel as a fellow democracy fighting a wave of terror attacks against its civilian population.
Other initiatives were introduced in Congress to impose a new round of sanctions on Arafat and the Palestinian Authority that he leads and to define Syria as an "axis of evil" state that supports international terror.
One new measure, introduced in the Senate by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California would deny U.S. entry visas to Arafat and other senior PLO officials and would require the seizing of PLO financial assets in the United States.
The AIPAC-backed wave of rising bipartisan support for Israel is especially strong in the House of Representatives. There, the conservative, fundamentalist De Lay has made common cause with Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat and Holocaust survivor, to introduce legislation equating the Israeli incursion into the West Bank with the U.S. war on terror since the Sept. 11 attacks last year.
AIPAC is also now closing ranks with its former great critic and rival within the Jewish community, the more hawkish Zionist Organization of America, a steadfast opponent of the Oslo Peace Process. ZOA's national president, Morton Klein, now sits on AIPAC's ruling executive committee. He proposed several of the initiatives that AIPAC has enthusiastically launched this month.
The pro-Israel activists who attended the AIPAC conference appeared more typical of mainstream American Jewry than the activists who packed Capitol Hill he week before for the support for Israel rally. The rally crowd was overwhelmingly Orthodox and right wing. They booed Wolfowitz. By contrast, AIPAC conference attendees gave former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, the main architect of the now discredited Oslo Peace Process, a respectful if not wildly enthusiastic hearing.
AIPAC is just over half a century old and has been at the height of its power now for more than two decades. Judging by the confidence of its supporters and officials at the Washington Hilton this week, they expect enjoy that power -- and to exercise it -- for at least as long to come.
