And Now, the Manocherian Candidate
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

As we pass the third anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, American support for Israel has become the secret election issue. Like reform of Social Security in the past, the “U.S.-Israel relationship” is now the third rail of American politics. Democrats are caught between those wanting to alter policy and those who, motivated by a combination of ideological, emotional, historical, and electoral arguments, advocate a steady course. The GOP is warmly embracing the relationship, with all the enthusiasm once reserved for the special tie to Chiang’s Formosa, in the years before President Nixon, a so-called creature of the “China lobby,” adopted a two-China policy.
From September 11 forward, President Bush took only nine months to formalize a new doctrine for the Israel-Palestine dispute. In his June 24, 2002, address from the Rose Garden, the president announced American support for the establishment of a Palestinian state but put the onus on the Palestinians to stop terrorist attacks against Israel.
That formula was codified six months later in the Road Map for Middle East Peace, a how-to guide in support of which the European Union, Russia, and United Nations joined the Bush administration. But the theory that Arab extremists are angry with America due partly to its support for Israelis is gaining ground, so that American support for Israel has received renewed critical scrutiny.
This is bolstered by the Western Europeans, who have taken the view that the Israel-Palestine dispute is the major source of friction between the West and the empire of Islam. Almost 60% of Western Europeans believe Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. If Israel is to blame for a brewing world war,one might conclude that Islamic rage against the West will subside if Israel stands down by agreeing to sacrifice part of its current position in order to appease the Arab world.
The Blame Israel crowd is increasingly making itself heard. In books by ex-generals, in statements signed by bevies of former diplomats, in an assessment by a senator retiring from office, Israel is being routinely blamed for dragging America into the Iraq war.Views formerly associated with Patrick Buchanan and the anti-Semitic right and with Ralph Nader and the anti-Semitic left have now trickled into the mainstream. At The New York Review of Books, it is de rigeur to insist, as does Joan Didion, that American support of Israel is an idee fixe, the critical revision of which is long overdue.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows writes, in the October issue, that the Bush administration “dismissed out of hand any connection between policies towards the Israel-Palestine conflict and increasing tension with many Islamic states.” As for the CIA, check out the central claim of the book by an agent approved for publication, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.” It is that Islamists are at war with the West over not its culture and values but its policies, principally support for Israel.
It is in this context that the FBI’s investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee must be seen. Israel’s critics within the permanent government feel strong enough to lash out. They levy accusations that the pro-Israel movement is, in the most generous formulation, guilty of identifying the American interest with the narrow Israeli one. Or, in the worst case, guilty of a loyalty divided between America and another sovereign state.
This faction, which includes elements at the State Department and CIA, believes that Mr. Bush must lose the election and that its hope to redirect American policy lies in the victory of Senator Kerry. It looks forward to Mr. Kerry replacing the neoconservatives now serving the Bush administration, especially at the Pentagon and around the vice president.
The fight between part of the intelligence community and the State Department on the one side and the vice president and the Pentagon on the other has escalated with the perception that Iraq has become a quagmire. Each side in the dispute wants blame to fall on the other. In this game, the anti-neoconservatives have clearly mastered the art of the leak.
To help discredit the Pentagon, someone got the CD full of Abu Ghraib torture photos to Seymour Hersh; someone leaked the unintelligible story that Ahmed Chalabi told an Iranian agent that Washington had broken a secret Iranian code – unintelligible because according to the report, the agent then used the allegedly broken code to report to Tehran that the code was broken; and someone told CBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post about the probe of what is commonly if incorrectly referred to as the Jewish lobby, a story that, like most folk mythology, changes in the telling.
The funniest thing about the big neoconservative-Aipac conspiracy theory is the idea that the neoconservatives are allied with Aipac. There may be a convergence of a few views: Aipac’s members are, like the community from which they spring, largely Democrats. You may find a larger proportion of Bush supporters among Aipac activists than among American Jews at large, but most Aipac officers and presidents are Democrats.
That includes Aipac’s current president, Bernice Manocherian of Manhattan, who quite properly has not divulged her preference in the presidential race, but has been a fund-raiser for the Democratic party. I can’t say whether Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry is the Manocherian candidate, but I predict that whoever wins in November will find this new third rail of American politics highly charged. Or Mr. Bush will pull a switch the way Mr. Nixon did on China.