By the time of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide victory, the forces influencing US policy in the Middle East were already beginning to change. The views inside the Reagan administration itself were divided between the pro-Arab impulses of the national security establishment and the president’s own political interests and personal sympathies. The same had been the case in previous administrations. But acting to shape Reagan’s views was a new group of pro-Israel actors whose power and influence were poised to increase exponentially. These included a coterie of neoconservative writers, editors, and political operatives who were mostly, but not exclusively, Jewish; a newly politicized Christian conservative movement that shared many neoconservative goals; and an expanded and emboldened American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) backed by the energetic, almost unanimous support of the Jewish community and its institutions, which worked hard to ensure that deference to Israel’s interests dominated any and all even remotely relevant debates.
The tree of neoconservatism spawned two main branches. The first, located in Manhattan, focused on culture and was centered on Commentary magazine, still published by the American Jewish Committee and edited by Norman Podhoretz. The second, in Washington, was devoted to amassing political power, influence, and patronage, often under the tutelage of the Commentary crowd. The New York branch largely consisted of formerly left-wing Jewish intellectuals who felt themselves to have been “mugged by reality.” Whereas, in Washington, Democratic anti-Communist political operatives simply flipped to become Republican anti-Communist political operations.
Broadly speaking, the New Yorkers were responsible for the battle of ideas, and the Washingtonians for implementing policy. After Pat Moynihan’s 1976 Senate victory, Podhoretz apparently entertained fantasies of extending his tiny kingdom all the way to the Oval Office, with Moynihan leading the charge. One night at the senator’s farm in Oneonta, New York, according to a witness, Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter (a fellow Commentary contributor), grabbed Liz Moynihan’s arms and screamed, “You’re standing in the way of this man becoming president! It’s you, it’s you, it’s you.” Her husband would soon disappoint both of them by refusing to run for president and by drifting back to a more traditional liberal stance during the Reagan years. When he first arrived in the Senate in 1977, however, he played the middleman, taking Commentary’s ideas to the Senate floor. He traded staffers and legislative priorities with another neocon heartthrob, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), and hired the children and other members of the New Yorkers’ friends and family circle. (Podhoretz and Decter’s son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, worked for both men.)
Initially, neoconservative ideology focused on domestic issues. These interests grew out of its adherents’ concern with the takeover of the Democratic Party by the kinds of people who had nominated George McGovern in 1972. The “Zionism Is Racism” battle had been an exception to this rule: they had taken an interest in an international relations issue because of Moynihan’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, his involvement in that issue in particular, and his ideological romance with Podhoretz and Commentary. When neoconservatives then began to turn to foreign policy more generally, their twin goals were to prevent the Carter administration from demanding concessions from Israel and to do whatever they could to reheat the Cold War. Twelve years of détente policies under Nixon and Kissinger, followed by four years of peacemaking attempts under Jimmy Carter, were not to their liking. To achieve their goals, they sought to seed Washington with a group of young apparatchiks who would move in and out of government in the coming decades. The political party of the followers shifted over time: first they were disaffected Democrats, and later they were right-wing Republicans. In decided contrast to the foreign policy mandarins of previous decades, they had names, as historian Susanne Klingenstein has noted, such as “Abrams, Adelman, Kampelman, Kristol, Perle, Pipes, Rostow, and Wattenberg.” Scoop Jackson was not Jewish, but given his staff, his politics, and the political world in which he traveled, he might as well have been. (The Jewish Institute for National Security of America [JINSA] named an annual award after him in 1982.) The longtime Saudi diplomat Jamil Baroody, in a moment of perhaps inadvertent accuracy, once described Jackson as “more Zionist than the Zionists, more Jewish than the Jews.” In purely political terms, Zionism had now become more important to Jewishness than Judaism was.1
Neoconservatives were united largely by what they opposed. That lengthy list included New Leftists, peace activists, civil rights leaders, student demonstrators (and their faculty sympathizers), Arabs, feminists, environmentalists, gays and lesbians, détente-oriented diplomats, and, perhaps most prominently, Jewish supporters of any or all of the above. Neocons tended to collect all such miscreants under the labels of “the movement” when discussing its scruffier elements, and “McGovernism” when referring to the Democratic Party. The ideas the neocons found so offensive had been pumped into the bloodstream of American culture, they argued, by members of what they called a “new class,” a term borrowed from the Yugoslav communist scholar Milovan Djilas. This class consisted of liberal bureaucrats, academics, journalists, and others under the sway of what the neocons understood to be an “adversary culture” in the making, which, having lost the nerve to fight for the old verities, was now in the throes of what they called a “culture of appeasement.” Not coincidentally, the professions and social groups that made up this culture were heavily populated, and in some cases dominated, by young Jews. The neoconservatives felt they were a bulwark against all these groups and their destruction of what they considered American values. The neoconservatives professed to respect their elders and expected the same from the younger generation, especially writers and political activists. Young Jewish leftists, meanwhile, were vehemently critical of the country, of the institutions the neoconservatives held so dear, and also of Israel. In almost perfect contrast to how leftists had viewed Israel at its founding, most New Leftist literature on the subject of the Arab/Israeli conflict treated Israel as a racist outpost of imperialism. According to Mark Rudd, the Jewish leader of the protesters who took over Columbia University’s administration offices in 1968, shutting down the university and leading eventually to a violent confrontation with the police, the issue of Israel and Palestine was what “distinguished the true anti-imperialists from the liberals.” These developments were so worrisome to the older Jewish intellectuals who had helped to found neoconservatism that they organized a 1970 conference on the subject, which led to a book-length collection of essays, The New Left and the Jews, published the following year. A great many of the analyses it offered to explain what its authors took to be the irrational behavior of the young thinkers and activists veered into the realm of the personal and psychological, rather than bothering with the political content of the protesters’ concerns.2
When “the movement” offered up disrespect and contempt, neocons did the same. The novelist Saul Bellow depicted the kind of disrespect that stirred up the ire of neoconservatives in a key scene of his 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. During a lecture by a fictional Columbia University professor, a heckler yells out, “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come.” But Bellow had actually been the recipient of a similar outburst at one of his own lectures. Such incidents help explain the fury so many neoconservatives directed at their putative adversaries long after their victories had already been assured.3
Neoconservatism was, in many respects, built on resentments. But it was inspired by one great love—Israel—a love that coincided perfectly with its obsessive hatred of the Soviet Union, and, by extension, of the Arab regimes and terrorist organizations the Soviets supported. Eugene Victor Rostow, whose very name—like that of his brother, the hawkish Kennedy/Johnson war strategist Walt Whitman Rostow—can be seen to embody the arc of neoconservative history, argued, as chair of the neocon-dominated Committee on the Present Danger, that, given what he judged to be a deepening “Arab dependence on the Soviet Union,” Israel had become an “indispensable ally” in America’s global struggle.4
Just as they seeded the staffs of senators and congressmen, the neocons’ reach expanded across the culture via both new magazines, such as The Public Interest, and old ones, including The New Republic, purchased by Martin Peretz in 1974. With the backing of wealthy conservative individuals and right-wing philanthropic foundations, they also started new think tanks and burrowed into old ones. JINSA, founded in 1976 by future Reagan officials Max Kampelman and Richard Schifter, sought to turn Vietnam doves into Israel hawks, or, as Kampelman put it, “to persuade Jewish members of Congress and the Jewish community to support a strong American defense.” It did not take long for names like these to appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed columns and television chat shows. The denizens of the capital got their opinion advice from these outlets the way women had traditionally taken their fashion cues from Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar.5
In this manner, they pursued what the early twentieth-century Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci described as “cultural hegemony,” especially within the world of little magazines and Washington punditry and the ranks of political mavens. During a freezing February weekend in 1983, neocons gathered at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel off of Central Park to declare victory and curse their enemies. “We are surrounded by lynch mobs just barely restrained,” Podhoretz crowed, but “our work has not been in vain. We are a political community now. The resonance of what we do is greater than ever.” Furthermore, he said, “there are more of us around than there were ten years ago.… We are the dominant faction within the world of ideas—the most influential—the most powerful.” Now, he insisted, “the liberal culture has to appease us,” because “people like us made Reagan’s victory.”6
Many traditional conservatives detested the fact that traditional venues of conservative policy entrepreneurship had been colonized by a group of mostly urban Jewish former liberals and ex-Marxists. Barry Goldwater’s constituency, the same folks who powered Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy—mostly Republican gentiles in the South and West—did not like what they perceived as a Jewish takeover of what had been their party and movement. These resentments were partly ideological, partly cultural, and no doubt considerably turf driven. Many “paleocons,” as they came to be called, meaning authentic—the original conservatives as opposed to the “neo” ones—had never quite shed their antisemitic suspicions, and the neocons, as they saw it, played exactly to type. The prominent paleocon intellectual Russell Kirk complained of writers and thinkers who “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Echoing the analyses of both Gramsci and the German communist student activist Rudi Dutschke—albeit from an opposite political perspective and adding more than a smidgen of antisemitism—Kirk complained of what he called a “horde of dissenters… of Jewish stock” that had “skillfully insinuated themselves into the councils of the Nixon and Reagan Administrations!”7
Paleocons were understandably upset to see their preeminence among conservatives challenged, but the neocons were hardly the only group to surf the Reaganite wave. A new right-wing Christian movement had arisen in opposition to the Carter presidency. They abandoned their fellow born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter, for the decidedly casual churchgoer (and America’s first divorced president) Ronald Reagan. Gerald Ford had earned only 33 percent of the evangelical vote in 1976; eight years later, Reagan’s share rose to 85 percent. And while their feelings about Jews might charitably be termed “conflicted,” their devotion to Israel was unshakable.8
Christians had prayed for the return of the Jews to their biblical homeland as far back as the Reformation. But their support for the modern Zionist movement began with the Reverend William H. Hechler, an Anglican clergyman who, already dedicated to the cause of a Jewish return to the Holy Land, grew close to Zionist founder Theodor Herzl even before the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Hechler was a disciple of John Nelson Darby, another Anglican clergyman, who, during the first half of the nineteenth century, outlined his version of how end-times prophecies about Christ’s return and thousand-year reign, as predicted by the Book of Revelation, would be fulfilled. Darby’s beliefs, termed “premillennial dispensationalism,” constituted just one among many evangelical streams at the time. But the popularity of this interpretation of prophecy grew rapidly following the founding of Israel, and even more so in the wake of the 1967 war. Among its most successful popularizers were authors Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.9
The New York Times judged Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth (coauthored by Carole C. Carlson), to be the best-selling book of the decade. It spawned a prime-time television program with an estimated audience of seventeen million, along with a 1975 movie that was somehow narrated by Orson Welles. Lindsey claimed that the creation of Israel was a “paramount prophetic sign” of the coming “rapture,” when Christians would be swept up into heaven preceding a seven-year “tribulation” to take place on earth before Christ’s return and the millennial reign. Indeed, the creation of the state of Israel would prove to be the “fuse of Armageddon,” the final war at the end of the world. A dictator was “waiting in the wings somewhere in Europe,” Lindsey said, who would “make Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin look like choirboys.”10
Like Lindsey, the ex-minister Tim LaHaye saw in Israel’s founding “the most significant of the end-time signs, even the ‘super sign.’” Israel’s conquest of Jerusalem sent an even stronger signal. Together with his wife, Beverly, LaHaye founded a series of important political organizations, including Concerned Christians of America, along with the influential think tank Center for National Policy. He eventually authored or coauthored eighty-five fiction and nonfiction books, most of which were devoted to helping Christians prepare for the end of days. The most successful of these were those in the Left Behind series, which eventually included sixteen books, four films, and video games, reaching sixty-five million people though the books alone. In a 1984 nonfiction work, LaHaye promoted a scenario in which Israel would ultimately become a lifeline for the United States. “As long as there is a strong Israeli air force with the capability of nuclear retaliation,” LaHaye promised, “Russia will not attack the United States.… Before they can suppress the world with their totalitarian ideology, they must first knock out the United States. And to do that, they must first remove Israel.… Thus Israel’s safety and military strength are our own nation’s best interest for survival.”11
LaHaye is also credited with convincing the Reverend Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority, the first in what would become a series of extremely influential political movements of the era based in the Christian right. Though he adopted a pose of theological discretion before secular audiences, Falwell, a Southern Baptist, also shared the premillennialist assumptions about the coming Armageddon and looked forward to its arrival. In 1980, he published Armageddon and the Coming War with Russia, arguing that the Bible had prophesied imminent nuclear war and concluding that this was to be welcomed because, in the end, Christ would return in glory. A mushroom cloud appeared on the front cover, and its final page reads: “WHAT A DAY THAT WILL BE!” Falwell told an interviewer in 1981, “We believe that Russia, because of her need of oil—and she’s running out now—is going to move in on the Middle East, and particularly Israel because of their hatred of the Jew, and that it is at that time when all hell will break out. And it is at that time when I believe there will be some nuclear holocaust on this earth.” Falwell said he considered Israel’s founding on May 14, 1948, to be the most important date in history since the birth of Jesus. And while he denied this before secular and Jewish audiences, he was also on board with the premillennialist program that demanded Jews shape up before it was too late. “The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief,” he warned. “They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior.” However odd such views may have sounded to journalists or Jews (or just about anyone else who was not part of the evangelical strain of Christianity), they were very much in the mainstream of the new Christian right.12
Falwell owed his fame and influence in significant measure to a 1960 Federal Communications Commission rule change that allowed broadcast stations to sell unprofitable airtime to churches and count it against the religious programming quotas they had to fulfill in order to retain their licenses. Mainline Protestant and Catholic churches did not feel comfortable hawking their theological wares on TV, and so the rule change meant that “televangelism” became almost the exclusive purview of right-wing evangelicals. By 1979, the year he founded the Moral Majority, Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour appeared on 373 stations—more than Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show—and his Lynchburg, Virginia, church grew to 17,000 members with a staff of over 1,000.13
Before 1967, mainline Protestant churches had largely supported the Zionists against the Palestinians. Once the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began, they came to define the conflict differently. Their misgivings about Israel became less important than they had been, however, with time, as these churches were rapidly losing both members and influence. Meanwhile, the evangelical churches grew in membership and influence. Observers who had not been paying attention to the premillennialist turn in evangelical theology were no doubt surprised to see the defense of Israel among the Moral Majority’s foundational precepts. The New York Times did not introduce its readers to the concept of “Christians who call themselves Zionists” until 1980. By that time, however, Falwell had already traveled twice to Israel as a guest of the Begin government. There, he had warned West Bank settlers and their supporters that America was “wavering at this time in her position on the side of Israel.” But he made his own support clear, saying, “I believe that if we fail to protect Israel, we will cease to be important to God.” And he made sure that the Moral Majority took this responsibility extremely seriously. Item number six on its ten-point platform read, “We support the state of Israel and the Jewish people everywhere.” At the group’s inaugural press conference, he promised to work with anyone who shared its beliefs regarding “national defense, abortion and Israel.”14
The Begin government evinced no qualms about embracing Israel’s new friends, regardless of their theological beliefs. Indeed, right-wing religious Israelis and Christian evangelicals found much to agree on. They shared commitments to biblical exegesis, social conservatism, and militarism, and they loathed both socialism and Islam. It was no stretch for Falwell in 1979 to be chosen the first gentile ever to receive the Likud party’s “Jabotinsky Award,” named after its founder (and the founder of Revisionist Zionism). Much as they had done for fans of the movie Exodus, though on a far larger scale, the Israelis also developed a robust tourist business for their new allies, one dedicated to Christian holy places. As early as 1980, the director of the Pilgrim Promoting Division of the Israeli Ministry of Trade and Tourism estimated that 100,000 out of 250,000 American visitors to Israel were Christian tourists. Many of these contributed generously to the construction and protection of Israel’s West Bank settlements.15
The evangelicals, however, would prove to be a far harder sell to American Jews. Largely still liberal, many American Jews were still enthusiastic boosters of almost everything the Moral Majority had been formed to oppose: the separation of church and state, racial integration, reproductive freedom, and a dovish foreign policy, save when it involved Israel. Sociologically speaking, the two sides lived not merely in different neighborhoods in different parts of the country, but also in the functional equivalent of different universes. Leaving aside Jews’ unhappy role in premillennialist eschatology—Falwell had predicted rather matter-of-factly that, when the Antichrist arrives, “of course, he’ll be Jewish”—there were also quite a few problematic ideas expressed about present-day Jewish Americans in some evangelical circles. Falwell, for instance, defending his politics to a conservative Christian group, once said he understood why some of them didn’t like Jews—because they “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose.”16
But like Begin and his Likud party, the neocons were all in with Falwell and company. Writing in Commentary, Irving Kristol, universally credited as neoconservatism’s “godfather,” wondered, “Why should Jews care about the theology of a fundamentalist preacher when they do not for a moment believe that he speaks with any authority” on theological matters? After all, he concluded, “it is their theology, but it is our Israel.” Kristol insisted that Jews subjugate their liberalism to their Zionism: “This is the way the Israeli government has struck its own balance vis-à-vis the Moral Majority, and it is hard to see why American Jews should come up with a different bottom line.” After all, Jews had won the fight against exclusion from the nation’s country clubs, he mused in another article. Did they “now feel it necessary to take on the specter of discrimination in that Great Country Club in the Sky”?17
All of this was part and parcel of the neoconservative campaign by Kristol and company to convince American Jews to join them on their journey rightward. In this regard, the neocons, many of whom were former Trotskyists, saw themselves as a kind of conservative version of Marxism’s notional vanguard within the Jewish community. This campaign would fail spectacularly. Jews, together with Blacks, would remain the Democrats’ most loyal ethnic group, but Kristol and other neocons succeeded in convincing many Christians (and more than a few journalists) that they spoke for American Jews. This may have been the idea to begin with. It was Arthur Hertzberg’s view that “what they are really selling is not neoconservatism to the Jewish community, but themselves as leaders of the Jews to the goyish community.” This had the effect of further skewing the Israel-Palestine debate in a rightward direction. The neocons’ success in the media and politics led to greater and greater avenues of influence in the Republican Party, where, together with the evangelical Christians and the generous contributions of a few extremely wealthy Jewish funders, they successfully converted the party to a militant version of Zionism that refused to entertain almost any compromise on Israel’s retention of “Judea,” “Samaria,” and, most of all, an “undivided Jerusalem.”18
The Christian Zionists’ devotion to “Greater Israel” earned them a pass from the neocons for their occasional outbreaks of antisemitism. When the Reverend Pat Robertson, an evangelical entrepreneur and founder and president of the enormously popular Christian Broadcasting Network, appeared to blame a worldwide Jewish conspiracy for the downfall of Western civilization, among other things, Norman Podhoretz insisted that Robertson’s pro-Israel politics “trump[ed] the anti-Semitic pedigree of his ideas.” Podhoretz insisted that “Israel was, after all, the most important issue of Jewish concern,” and here Robertson was “on the side of the angels.” (Robertson had predicted that “war with the Soviet Union is inevitable, if I read Bible prophecy properly,” and “the chances are that the U.S. will come in as a defender of Israel,” and so, therefore, “it looks like everything is shaping up.”) The Anti-Defamation League, initially sympathetic to the deal on offer from the Christian Zionists, under its director Nathan Perlmutter, had reversed itself under his successor, Abraham Foxman, beginning in 1987. Inspired by a 1989 declaration signed by a dozen evangelical leaders calling for a redoubled commitment to the conversion of the Jews, Foxman’s ADL issued a hard-hitting report on how they were fostering racism, sexism, the persecution of homosexuals, and a general lack of respect for American pluralism. This condemnation, in turn, inspired Midge Decter to attack the ADL in her husband’s magazine and to organize fully seventy-five fellow neocons to sign a full-page New York Times advertisement doing the same.19
These misgivings notwithstanding, the leaders of mainstream Jewish institutions and the premillennialist evangelicals managed to find common ground not only in support of Israel’s expansion to the West Bank, but also in support of Soviet Jewish emigration. This shotgun marriage was made not in heaven, but in Washington, and it was overseen by a newly rejuvenated AIPAC, now positioned to become America’s most powerful foreign policy lobby. It was not as if the pro-Israel group had been unconcerned about the plight of Soviet Jews living under especially oppressive conditions, even by Soviet standards. While the movement was undoubtedly motivated by humanitarian concerns and inspired many thousands of idealistic volunteers, it simultaneously contained crucial realpolitik value for Israel and its conservative supporters. Winning their right to emigration would mean that Soviet Jews would likely end up in Israel, something that American Jewish organizations strongly encouraged, despite the fact that many of the émigrés would have preferred the United States. A massive influx of ex-Soviet Jews could defuse the “demographic time bomb” Israel allegedly faced (meaning that the longer it held on to the occupied territories, the sooner Arab birthrates would turn Jews into a minority in lands it controlled). This is exactly what came to pass when, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union finally opened its doors during the final days of the 1980s. As more than a million Soviet Jewish emigrants resettled in Israel, their deep hatred of socialism and socialists moved the nation’s political center of gravity further into right-wing, anti-democratic territory. For the Christian Zionists, this all came together in one big, beautiful, pro-religion, anti-Soviet, pro-Likud, pro-Armageddon package. As one AIPAC researcher said of the Christian Zionists at the time, “Sure, these guys give me the heebie-jeebies. But until I see Jesus coming over the hill, I’m in favor of all the friends Israel can get.”20
In its early years, AIPAC had given the impression of amateurism and ineffectiveness, though this was really a mask for the low-key manner in which it got the job done. The organization came about largely as a reaction to the October 1953 Israeli attack on the West Bank village of Qibya, then under Jordanian rule. Isaiah L. “Si” Kenen was working as a lobbyist in Congress for the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs after having done the same job for Israel’s foreign ministry. He wrote an associate that reports of the massacre had “discredited the premises of our propaganda and given the color of truth to Arab propaganda,” and suggested they put together a formal operation to make Israel’s case whenever circumstances made it necessary to do so.21
A second, no less important, impetus came in the form of complaints from then secretary of state John Foster Dulles and his assistant secretary for Near East affairs, Henry Byroade. Speaking to the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, they begged for mercy from the unruly amalgamation of organizations—whether Zionist, non-Zionist, or, in the case of the American Council for Judaism, anti-Zionist—professing to give voice to concerns about US policies toward Israel and always asking for meetings. (Dulles was especially annoyed at all the “various inaccuracies and distortions” he was hearing from the “Jewish fraternity” following the Eisenhower administration’s short-lived decision to withhold Mutual Security funds from Israel and to support the strong censure of Israel in the UN Security Council in the wake of Qibya.) Jewish leaders had been reluctant to unite, in part for reasons of personal prerogatives; each one no doubt enjoyed being king of his own personal hill, and each of them likely nursed significant disagreements with the others (“Two Jews, three opinions…”).22
The historian Lila Corwin Berman noted a third concern: “The more that Jews appeared as a singular political entity, the more likely they could be perceived as clannish, unassimilable and, thus, incapable of fulfilling the duties of national citizenship.” But the Jews really had no choice. Administration officials insisted they could not continue to meet with sixteen separate organizations. The result was the decision to form two overarching organizations: the stand-alone American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, which would later be renamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The former’s job was to lobby Congress and help shape public opinion, and the latter’s was to meet with the president, the secretary of state, and other high officials.23
Working with a shoestring staff in a small, cluttered office on Capitol Hill, the extremely personable and rather unassuming Kenen would corral senators and representatives to write and support legislation to supply Israel with cheap loans, generous trade terms, and bargain-basement prices for advanced weaponry. Asked to describe his job, Kenen said he needed only one sentence: “We appeal to local leadership to write or telegraph or telephone their Congressmen to urge them to call upon the President to overrule the Department of State.” This was done quite informally, however, as Kenen’s most important rule in this phase of AIPAC’s operations was to “get behind legislation; don’t step out in front of it (that is, keep a low profile).” It was a tribute to Kenen’s effectiveness that a top US National Security Council official, Robert Komer, would boast, in August 1965, that the Americans had turned out to be “Israel’s chief supporters, bankers, direct and indirect arms purveyors, and ultimate guarantors” to a degree that “far exceeded that which can be justified under [US Agency for International Development] economic criteria.” Even the aid to the Arab nation of Jordan, in which the United States had “little other interest,” was given largely to ensure Israel’s safety. Komer insisted that his assessment of the sweet deal Israel received—which was written for the purposes of quieting the complaints of a small group of Jewish congressmen—be kept confidential, as “the more quiet these matters can be kept the more we can do.”24
Kenen’s successor, the hard-charging Morris J. Amitay, who took over in 1974, expanded the organization but embraced his predecessor’s preference for minimal publicity designed to achieve maximum effect. He informed potential allies that lobbying for Israel in the aftermath of the 1973 war was now “a whole new ballgame,” as “Israel required billions.” He “wanted to make AIPAC an effective modern lobby,” and aid for Israel the responsibility not of American Jewish donors, but of the US government. Amitay focused on the fact that many congressional staff members “happen[ed] to be Jewish.” They were “willing,” he discovered, “to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness,” and were also “in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators.” AIPAC had faced some unwelcome scrutiny during the Kennedy administration when J. William Fulbright (D-AR), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, launched an investigation into its funding. His researcher, the future investigative journalist Walter Pincus, found a great deal of hidden foreign funding that had been funneled into AIPAC, a clear violation of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act, and a potential propaganda point for American antisemites and enemies of Israel the world over. Fulbright wanted to expose AIPAC’s activities and demand that its staff register as foreign lobbyists. Israel’s friends, however, reached President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson, who wanted none of this. Johnson prevailed upon his good friend and former southern Senate colleague to carry out his investigation entirely in closed session, and to keep his findings out of the Congressional Record. Eventually, Fulbright decided it was best simply to accept AIPAC’s explanation that everything it did was completely kosher, both morally and legally.25
AIPAC had clearly been doing something right. Fulbright, after all, credited Israel’s “organized Jewish supporters” with being “the most powerful and efficient foreign policy lobby in American politics,” and of “duping Americans into a policy.” Both the Israelis and US administrations would come to much prefer dealing almost exclusively with AIPAC than with other Jewish groups—much less all of them—because it was a single-issue group and did not bother anyone about the kinds of social justice concerns that continued to animate many other Jewish organizations. A decade later, in mid-March 1973, President Nixon complained that he could not make any progress on Middle East peace because “Israel’s lobby is so strong that the Congress is not reasonable.” We have seen, in previous chapters, the lobby’s role in stymying the policy initiatives of Presidents Ford and Carter. But it was still a minor-league organization compared to the powerhouse it would soon become.26
AIPAC’s efforts took a giant step beyond merely a legislative agenda when, in 1973, Kenen formed what he called the “Washington Truth Squad” to seek to defend Israel with “editorial writers, columnists or broadcasters” who might otherwise be critical. It would also encourage “public figures to counteract… pro-Arab or anti-Israel spokesmen.” Over time, this would become a multimillion-dollar operation that dozens of organizations and literally thousands of individuals were invited to join. One Forward writer would observe, decades later, that “rooting out perceived anti-Israel bias in the media had become for many American Jews the most direct and emotional outlet for connecting with the conflict 6,000 miles away.” It was yet another manifestation of American Jews’ intense embrace of what Benedict Anderson termed “long-distance nationalism.”27
Over time, this commitment worked political wonders. “If there is anything in the paper that smacks of criticism of Israel, my editor’s phone starts ringing off the hook in the morning,” said David Lamb, who covered Egypt for the Los Angeles Times. The same was true for almost everyone who covered the Middle East for any major media institution. As a result, “the editors shepherd through much more carefully stories about Israel than the Arab world because they know they will come under a lot of pressure,” Lamb said. No doubt countless stories were skewed, or never written at all, to avoid the bother that would be certain to arise were Israel to be portrayed unfavorably by reporters, editors, and producers. They simply did not want to deal with the hassle, much less the personal abuse. “Of course, a lot of self-censorship goes on,” Menachem Shalev, a former spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York, once bragged to a reporter. “Journalists, editors, and politicians, for that matter, are going to think twice about criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is good at orchestrating pressure.” AIPAC’s power to determine the acceptable parameters of debate about Israel, whether in Congress or in the media, certainly rankled. This is what former New York Times executive editor Max Frankel, a Jewish pro-Israel partisan, meant when he revealed, long after his retirement, that “even fervent friends of Israel, like George McGovern and Ed Muskie, used to complain to me during their campaigns for president that they had to ‘clear’ their statements on the Middle East with Jewish censors.”28
AIPAC was powerful, but it was not unbeatable if it went up against a determined president. It could not block the Carter administration’s sale of sixty F-15s to Saudi Arabia in 1978, for example. Most portentously, it met defeat again in the first test it faced during Reagan’s presidency. But it would never lose so quietly again.
The fight centered on the United States’ plan to sell Saudi Arabia an airborne early warning and control system (AWACS) plane as part of a larger arms deal that originated with the Carter administration. It came out of US and Saudi fears of the spread of radical Shia Islam across the Arab world, as it was thought that it could one day threaten the Saudis’ Sunni Islamic regime. By the time the Reagan team finally announced the $8.5 billion deal in April 1981, it had morphed into the single largest arms sale in history, terrifying the Israelis in the process. (Kept secret at the time was a US-Saudi plan to spend as much as $150 billion building military bases, airfields, and other military infrastructure to accommodate this and future arms sales, which particularly appealed to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the former top executive at the defense contractor Bechtel.) Even before the announcement was made, AIPAC had secured signatures from 54 senators for a letter to the president stating their “strong belief that this sale is not in the best interests of the United States and [that they] therefore recommend that you refrain from sending this proposal to the Congress.” Another letter, this one signed by 224 members of the House, said much the same thing. The votes in both houses of Congress looked to be a rout in the making. But the Reagan White House retaliated by rallying the still pro-Arab security bureaucracy, oil and weapons industry lobbyists, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Working on behalf of all of these, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the son of Saudi Arabia’s defense minister and a nephew of its king, directed a well-funded and well-organized lobby for the sale. He hired a lobbyist who understood that, “unlike AIPAC, the Saudis and the Arab countries do not have the means to reach out into the country.… The Arab channel in this country is paper thin.” The PR team therefore put the question in terms that twisted a knife into the guts of the American Jewish establishment: Were the senators “with Begin over Reagan”? Reagan embraced this narrative by complaining, “It is not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy.” One Republican senator reportedly received a call from ex-president Gerald Ford—while he was at a dinner for Jewish leaders, no less—who demanded, “Are we going to let the fucking Jews run American foreign policy?” All of these interests, plus a new Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate that did not wish to humiliate their leader, were enough to deny AIPAC its victory.29
The lesson AIPAC learned was that it needed to expand geographically, bureaucratically, culturally, and any other way it could think of for its next battle. Its new director, Thomas Dine, had been an aide to the Senate’s liberal lion, Ted Kennedy. Dine had little connection to Jewish institutions and none at all to Israel (his gentile wife, Joan, joked to friends that he could not have located Israel on a map). But he knew how to organize a lobby. Dine is universally credited with recognizing the value of turning AIPAC into a grassroots operation with its own local chapters that could pressure lawmakers to follow their line on Israel or, if necessary, locate candidates to oppose them and help them to secure funding. It was not uncommon for the funders AIPAC located to demand the right to script a politician’s positions on Israel-related matters in return for financial support. Over a period of decades, these contributions would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.30
To put what he called “Jewish muscle” to work, Dine initially identified twenty-five states where grassroots campaigns could target significant populations of both Jews and evangelical Christians. AIPAC’s annual budget increased from $1.2 million to $15 million during the 1980s, on its way to $50 million by the end of the century. Its membership expanded to more than 100,000 over the same period, with nine regional offices, ten satellite offices, and a staff of over 100. At roughly the same time, US public spending on military aid to Israel increased by a factor of more than 1000 percent.31
With these funds and an engaged membership behind it, AIPAC soon became an important player—often the most important player—not only in Israel policy debates but also in any other policy debate that was seen by AIPAC to potentially affect Israel’s interests in some fashion. Speaking of his own Democratic caucus after he announced his retirement, Representative David Price (D-NC) admitted that when “AIPAC said ‘jump,’ we’d say ‘How high?’” After one vote in which AIPAC demanded that Democratic congressmen vote in favor of aid to the murderous military junta in El Salvador, which Israel was providing with military aid, and which was also one of the few nations to support it in the United Nations, a congressman told the Washington Post’s Robert Kaiser, “I displayed my usual cowardice.” His vote was consistent with the understanding of the unwritten law of Israel-related issues in Congress as explained to the journalist Peter Beinart decades later by a Democratic aide: “If you’re labeled as anti-Israel then other members of Congress will be skeptical of everything you do even if it’s only marginally related.”32
Just how much influence AIPAC enjoyed over US policies in the Middle East, and the limits of permissible criticism of Israel or support for Palestinians, would, over time, become the most disputatious points of the entire American debate over Israel. Beginning with Dine’s reign and continuing through the present, AIPAC and its (unofficially) affiliated organizations amassed so many tools of political power and influence that it was hard for anyone—even its professional opponents—to keep up with it. Unlike a typical lobby, AIPAC went beyond merely influencing congressional votes. It not only wrote legislation, but also recruited congressional candidates, and it ensured, via cut-outs, that their races were well funded against candidates who did not vote its way. It created think tanks, sent politicians (and their wives) on VIP tours of Israel, policed the public discourse, and smeared pro-Palestinian voices as antisemites, self-hating Jews, and worse. It trained college students and funded their internships across the government. It guided the hiring practices of not only senators and congressmen, but also of the Defense Department, the State Department, the Commerce Department, and other agencies, vetoing certain hires, promoting others, and often determining how much foreign aid other countries, including Israel’s adversaries, might receive.
A significant portion of AIPAC’s success in steering policy arose from its ability to provide congressional staff with research, talking points, and detailed drafts of the legislation it wanted passed. But as with almost everything else in American politics, the true source of its power was money. AIPAC did not endorse candidates, nor did it give away money, at least until December 2021, when it finally changed its policy and announced the creation of its own political action committee. Before that, its members raised money via advisements to friendly donors. Those candidates it approved of appeared on lists for Jewish donors nationwide, and those it did not, did not. In April 2016, Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that raises money to help elect women to public office, gave a short disquisition to a panel on Israel and the US election, based on her previous experience as finance director for congressional candidates:
Before you went to the Jewish community [to raise money], you had a conversation with the lead AIPAC person in your state and they made it clear that you needed a paper on Israel. And so you called all your friends who already had a paper on Israel—that was designed by AIPAC—and we made that your paper. This was before there was a campaign manager, a policy director or a field director because you have got to raise money before you do all of that. I have written more Israel papers than you can imagine. I am from Montana. I barely knew where Israel was until I looked at a map, and the poor campaign manager would come in, or the policy director, and I’d be like, “Here is your paper on Israel. This is our policy.” That means that these candidates who were farmers, schoolteachers, or businesswomen, ended up having an Israel position without having any significant conversations with anybody.
When Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) ran for president in 2016, he said to a group of supporters, presumably at least partially in jest, “If I put together a finance team that will make me financially competitive enough to stay in this thing.… I may have the first all-Jewish cabinet in America because of the pro-Israel funding.” This was no joke, however. When Michelle Nunn, daughter of the hawkish former Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, sought to win her father’s Senate seat in 2014, her campaign director put together an initial strategy memo later leaked to the media. “Michelle’s position on Israel will largely determine the level of support here,” it read. “There is tremendous financial opportunity, but the level of support will be contingent on her position. This applies not only to PACs, but individual donors as well.”33
AIPAC has always pretended that its only tool was simple political persuasion, that it was just a lonely little lobby like any other—dentists or accountants, perhaps—fighting the combined interests of “Big Oil,” State Department Arabists, arms manufacturers, antisemites, and so on. Every once in a while, however, it found reason to boast, lest its message of reward and punishment prove too subtle for the right people to receive it. When the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the liberal-for-a-Republican Charles Percy, voted to approve an arms sales deal to Saudi Arabia in 1984, and suggested aloud that Israel initiate peace talks with the PLO, AIPAC responded by recruiting Congressman Paul Simon (D-IL) to run against him the next time he was up for election, promising millions in funds from Jewish contributors. Following Simon’s victory, Dine proudly crowed, “All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy.… And American politicians… got the message.” He had said much the same thing about the pro-Palestinian congressman Paul Findley after his defeat in the 1982 midterm election: “This is a case where the Jewish lobby made the difference. We beat the odds and defeated Findley.” Another, less public boast was made at the beginning of the Clinton administration, when an AIPAC official interrupted a conversation he was having with a reporter and pushed his napkin across the table: “You see this napkin?” he asked. “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”34
The rise of AIPAC, and with it the Conference of Presidents, certainly rankled among those who might have expected to become leaders of the American Jewish community in less money-and-politics-driven times. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg was one such dissident. Having been shoved aside from his perch as president of the venerably liberal, and increasingly irrelevant, American Jewish Congress, and retreating to his position as a congregational rabbi and writer and university professor, the Polish-born scholar/rabbi/agitator spoke disgustedly of the machine that AIPAC was building. “The AIPAC people are barely Jewish,” he complained to a journalist in the mid-1980s. “They certainly don’t know anything about Judaism, or Zionism for that matter. What kind of Jewish education do they have?” Hertzberg thought AIPAC was “creating more anti-Semites than it’s scaring away,” as it was deliberately confusing “being Jewish” with “supporting Israel” and “being an anti-anti-Semite.” He predicted that “it [would] all come crashing down” on AIPAC. But in this matter, he could hardly have been more wrong.35
AIPAC’s party line grew stronger at the expense of the Talmudic-trained rabbis, theologians, and scholars, as well as most of what constituted Judaism itself. Adultery, marriage outside the faith, eating spareribs on Yom Kippur—all these could all be forgiven—but never the public questioning of the policies of Israel’s government or the righteousness of its people. This was the lesson that the rabbis who founded Breira had learned, and it would be repeated until everyone got the message. AIPAC provided its members with the proper line on whatever issue faced Israel, and the wealthy and influential among them could use this to instruct the rabbis whose synagogues they funded regarding just who they could invite to speak in their shuls and what they, themselves, might safely say in their sermons. The “new Jews” of AIPAC, as Dine termed them, not only defeated the “Arab lobby” in the US government, but vanquished the rabbis as well.
“I’ve believed in many things in my life, but no conviction I’ve ever held has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel,” wrote Ronald Reagan’s ghostwriter, Robert Lindsey, in the fortieth president’s purported autobiography. This may have been an overstatement, but it was not a falsehood. With 39 percent of the Jewish vote, Ronald Reagan did better with American Jews than any other Republican candidate in modern times. But this was only one of the many reasons he assumed office with strong sympathy for Israel. Reagan was also known to muse, on occasion, as to whether there might not be something to that whole Armageddon thing happening sometime soon. (He told AIPAC’s Tom Dine, “You know I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about,” before adding, “I don’t know if you’ve noted any of those prophets lately but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.”)36
Reagan was not close to any Jews, however, and for the first time since Truman’s presidency, his cabinet featured a total of zero sons and daughters of Moses. His biggest concern was the Cold War, and he saw Israel as integral to fighting it. “Only by full appreciation of the critical role the State of Israel plays in our strategic calculus,” he announced during the 1980 campaign, “can we build the foundation for thwarting Moscow’s designs on territories and resources vital to our security and our national well-being.” One of his campaign workers even referred to the film version of Exodus when describing Israel’s history. But his sympathies were not widely shared within the national security bureaucracy, where the traditional Arabist worldview continued to hold sway. This was particularly true at the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger had personally approved the Bechtel Corporation’s policy of participation in the Arab boycott of Israel in his former role of general counsel. He was soon joined in the administration by his former Bechtel colleague George Shultz, who replaced the volatile, pro-Israel Alexander Haig as secretary of state. Yet even if there had been greater sympathy for Israel in the State and Defense Departments, the fact that Menachem Begin was Israel’s prime minister would have made the task of anyone seeking to make its case a decidedly challenging one.37
Begin did not even pretend to care what the gentile world thought of what Israel did. Back in 1967, a day after the Six-Day War ended, he had told the party he founded and chaired that “one third of the Jewish nation was exterminated by the Germans.” And “with a few exceptions,” he noted, “the rest of the world’s’ [sic] nations did nothing to stop the systematic genocide.” Begin had a particular nation in mind when he said this. “Six million Jews were exterminated during this generation, and the US did not save even one,” he inaccurately informed then prime minister Golda Meir, when she agreed to entertain a US peace initiative in 1970. In early 1981, he decided that Israel needed to destroy a nuclear reactor that was under construction in Iraq about ten miles southeast of Baghdad. He made this decision despite the fact that Iraq was a party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (as Israel was not) and would have been somewhere between ten and thirty years away from producing sufficient material for a bomb, even if it had already begun such production at the time. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s empty boasting notwithstanding, no such production was yet underway. (Begin, it should be noted, was likely a secret sufferer from bipolar disorder, according to a physician who treated him as prime minister, a diagnosis that was not revealed until decades later.)38
Begin sent US-supplied F-15 and F-16 aircraft to bomb the Iraqi reactor on June 7. This was an unambiguous act of war as well as an illegal violation of several nations’ airspace. It furthermore contradicted the terms of the US sale of the aircraft, which stipulated that they be used “for defense only.” Israel found itself condemned by the UN Security Council and General Assembly with no US veto. The New York Times described “Israel’s sneak attack” as “an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression,” while the Los Angeles Times called it “state-sponsored terrorism.”39
When the Reagan administration demonstrated its displeasure by suspending the delivery of a group of F-16s, Begin went ballistic. He called the American ambassador to Israel and demanded, “Are we a vassal state? A banana republic? Are we youths of fourteen who, if they don’t behave properly, are slapped across the fingers?” After reminding him about the history of US atrocities in World War II and Vietnam, he instructed the diplomat to tell his president that nobody would “frighten the great and free [Jewish] community in the United States.” America’s Jews, he promised, would stand by “the land of their forefathers. They have the right and duty to support [Israel].” Begin then went on, as he would do many times in the future, to equate Israel’s Arab adversaries to Nazi Germany. Speaking aloud to the ambassador from a letter that he also sent directly to Reagan, he explained, “I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface.” He and his “generation,” he informed “dear Ron,” had “swor[n] on the altar of God that whoever proclaims his intent to destroy the Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals his fate, so that what happened from Berlin… will never happen again.” Begin next phoned Jerry Falwell and, according to the reverend, asked him to “communicate to the American people, to the Christian public,” that “we’re not warmongers. We’re trying to save our little children from annihilation.” Falwell promised to do so, as “God deals with nations in relation to how they deal with Israel,” and, like Begin, went on to invoke Hitler and warn of “a second holocaust on the Jewish people.”40
The situation had few, if any, historical precedents. The leader of a tiny country, economically and militarily dependent on the United States for its survival and having committed what was unarguably an act of war using American-supplied weapons, was publicly deploying near apocalyptic rhetoric to instruct its president that he would be brooking no objections, lest it lead to another Holocaust. It was no easy task to defend Israel under these circumstances, but many took up the challenge. In the New York Times, for instance, former Nixon speechwriter William Safire attacked Reagan for a “policy of publicly humiliating our traditional ally,” insisting that it had “made us no new friends in the Arab world and removed the trust needed to encourage Israel to take risks for peace.” This argument—that the United States needed to back Israel to the hilt in all of its actions in order to give it the self-confidence “to take risks for peace”—would become another mainstay of the debate, though, once again, it was hard to see just when and where these risks, much less the peace, would materialize.41
Centrists such as Safire’s colleague James Reston, a gentile with close connections to the State Department, were alarmed but had no idea what to do about this seemingly irrational, nuclear-armed Israeli fanatic. Reston, who reported more than opined, explained that “officials here feel that Mr. Begin is a certified disaster for Israel and the rest of the world.” Yet ultimately, Congress once again lined up behind Israel. Although the Pentagon was especially unsympathetic to Israel under Weinberger, many in the building were not unhappy to see the Iraqi program get clipped. Reagan, aware of the strong evangelical support Begin enjoyed, decided he could live with it as well. He said of the country that had just carried out a daring bombing mission that it was hard for him “to envision Israel as being a threat to its neighbors.” Months later, Begin came to the United States, where he and Reagan agreed to formalize a mutual defense agreement aimed, in Reagan’s eyes, at the real enemy: the Soviet Union.42
Not long after these incidents, the venerated rabbi and philosopher David Hartman authored an influential article titled “Auschwitz or Sinai.” Hartman had moved to Jerusalem in 1971 from Montreal (and inspired much of his congregation to move with him). There he had founded the Shalom Hartman Institute, named for his father—a religious think tank devoted to issues of individual and collective morality. “It is both politically and morally dangerous for our nation to perceive itself essentially as the suffering remnant of the Holocaust,” he warned. Doing so led Jews to proclaim that “no one can judge the Jewish people,” a phenomenon he termed “morally arrogant” and “self-righteous.” The attitude was antithetical, he said, to “an increased sensitivity about all human suffering,” and in making such statements, “a basic Judaic principle is violated.” But Begin and his champions in the United States were not interested in such questions. To them, the Holocaust, and the world’s indifference, had given the Jewish people special license to do exactly what Hartman had warned against: to refuse “to take the moral criticism of the world seriously because the uniqueness of our suffering places us above the moral judgment of an immoral world.”43
A similar sort of dance took place a few months later when, with little warning and no diplomatic preparation whatsoever, Begin announced that Israel would unilaterally extend its “laws, jurisdiction and administration” to Syria’s Golan Heights, which had been captured in the 1967 war. The Reagan administration objected, as did countless newspaper editorial boards. Liberal Jews evinced concern, while both neoconservatives and evangelicals cheered. They were cheering an Israel that, thanks in part to their efforts, could do whatever it wished, whenever it wished. Prime Minister Begin proudly told the Knesset that he had purposely chosen not to consult the US president because “no one will dictate our lives to us, not even the United States.” Right again.44