Tide Turns in Favor of Pro-Israel Lobby

The worst of both worlds has lately been the lot of America’s pro-Israel lobby. Anti-Semites still warned in conspiratorial tones about the hold groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have over American foreign policy. Yet the lobby was powerless to stop President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in Congress.Aipac might have boasted of overwhelming pro-Israel majorities in Congress, but the new stars of the Democratic Party — like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — were staking their reputations on defaming supporters of the Jewish state as puppets bought off by Jewish money. The tide, though, is now turning. New political action committees, such as Pro-Israel America and Democratic Majority for Israel, as well as a new Super PAC affiliated with Aipac, began endorsing pro-Israel candidates in contested primaries in 2020 and have stepped up their efforts in 2022. In an interview this week, president of the Democratic Majority for Israel, Mark Mellman, told me that 85 percent of the candidates his organization supported in Democratic primaries this cycle have won. “There are a well-organized set of groups that have established as their goal a hostile takeover of the Democratic party, and they have moved anti-Israelism from the periphery of their agenda to the core of their agenda,” he said. “But overall they are losing that battle.”Mr. Mellman points to the failure of progressives to nominate Senator Sanders as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate in 2020, and the failure of activists to change the Democratic party’s platform in 2020 to denounce Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian lands.Now the progressive wing of the party is losing in key primaries. The most recent and important involves a Jewish Democrat, Andy Levin, elected in 2018 to Congress from Michigan’s 9th district. He comes from party royalty as the son of a former member of Congress, Sander Levin, and the nephew of a six-term senator, Carl Levin.In Congress, Andy Levin had aligned himself with a radical left organization, J-Street, and co-authored legislation that purported to support a two state solution, only to lay the stalemate on that head to Israeli settlements at Judea and Samaria.On August 2, Mr. Levin lost to Haley Stevens, who got $4.2 million in donations from Aipac’s Super PAC, known as the United Democracy Project. Pro-Israel donors also had success in the primary between Glenn Ivey and Donna Edwards in Maryland’s 4th congressional district. There, Aipac’s Super PAC spent $6 million for Mr. Ivey, who won the primary, despite Speaker Pelosi’s endorsement of Ms. Edwards. This new approach marks a return to an older strategy for Aipac and the pro-Israel community. In the 1970s and 1980s, Aipac targeted members of Congress who were hostile to Israel. In 1982, Senator Durbin was able to launch his political career with major support from Aipac members. He did that by unseating a Republican, Congressman Paul Findley, who would go on to blame 9/11 in part for America’s support for Israel. Trump’s China Gaffe President Trump is starting to sound like his foreign policy adversaries when he was in the White House. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference at Dallas, Mr. Trump blasted Mrs. Pelosi’s decision to visit the Republic of China on Taiwan, despite warnings from the Communist Chinese at Beijing.“What was she doing in Taiwan?” he asked. “She played right into their hands, because now they have an excuse to do whatever ever they are doing.” That’s a sentiment one might expect from the Biden administration, who also quietly urged the speaker to cancel her travel to the island.It’s bizarre coming from Mr. Trump, whose administration began to hold Chinese companies accountable for their secretive accounting and led a campaign to persuade allies to boycott Communist China’s Huawei corporation in the construction of the 5G wireless grid.When the Trump administration approved an arms sale to Taiwan in 2020, Chinese officials made similar threats. Mr. Trump wasn’t deterred then. So why is he now sounding like an appeaser? David Wurmser, who served in Mr. Trump’s national security council, told me over the weekend that Mr. Trump was aligning himself with a faction of the Republican party that would like America to play a more modest role on the world stage.“One of the things about his administration is that he didn’t allow threats to deter him from doing what was in the national interest,” Mr. Wurmser said. “Here we have a situation where we see a filament of the Republican foreign policy community.” He describes the filament as one that opposed Mr. Trump on the attack in which an Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, was killed.“All of the sudden,” Mr. Wurmser says, Mr. Trump “is operating from their outlook.”

Tide Turns in Favor of Pro-Israel Lobby

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