Local Citizen Response During a Crisis: Jewish Leaders Need to Lead

The FBI's investigation of AIPAC

John Landau contributed research and reporting to this article. The extremely comfortable and secure American Jewish community is totally unaware of the deadly peril that is even now threatening the security that it takes for granted. But in the near future, this peril will become too visible and immediate to be ignored any longer. I speak of the FBI's ongoing investigation of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee -AIPAC-- which has been ongoing for four years now and is very far from being over. A low-ranking civilian employee of the Pentagon, Larry Franklin, was formally charged on May 4 with having given classified information two years previously to two high-ranking executives of AIPAC who were not legally entitled to the information.  The two former AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen, the Director of research about foreign policy issues for AIPAC, and Keith Weissman, the deputy director of policy research with responsibility for policy towards Iran, were dismissed from their positions in January as the investigation of them gathered momentum. Four even more senior AIPAC executives, Executive Director Howard Kohr, Managing Director Richard Fishman, Research Director Rafael Danziger and Communications Director Renee Rothstein, were grilled by a grand jury in December 2004. AIPAC's offices have been raided twice by the FBI, and computer discs belonging to the two suspects have been seized.

No one is sure exactly when the other shoe will drop. But both FBI and AIPAC "sources" speaking off the record have said they expect that Rosen and Weissman will also be arrested and charged with having passed on the informat ion, which they are alleged to have known was classified "top secret," to Israel. They are not suspected of having actually received or passed on secret documents to Israel-only information that Franklin had gleaned from reading such documents. According to the complaint filed by the FBI against Franklin, the information he is supposed to have conveyed to the two AIPAC executives concerned possible terrorist threats to U.S. soldiers in Iraq from groups and individuals supported by Iran.

Why is any of this important to the American Jewish community?

Polls taken by the Anti-Defamation League have shown that the prejudice held most widely by their fellow Americans against American Jews is the belief that they are more loyal to the state of Israel than to the United States. According to the ADL polls, fully half of the American public suspects their Jewish compatriots of "dual loyalty." One striking example of the practical consequences of this prejudice is the almost incredibly harsh sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole that was imposed on Jonathan Pollard for spying for Israel in 1985.  Pollard has already served twenty years of his sentence, with no end to it except his death in sight. By contrast, all individuals convicted of spying for other countries allied to, or even on reasonably cordial terms with, the United States have received sentences of less than ten years.

The investigation of AIPAC, if it leads to the conviction of AIPAC executives, is certain to greatly increase this prejudice and give it new respectability among America's elite classes government officials, journalists, academics, think-tankers and all other decision-makers and opinion-makers. AIPAC is widely perceived in the Washington "beltway" as a representative of the American Jewish community as a whole.

AIPAC is sponsored and supported in one way or another by nearly all of the organizations represented on the board of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group that speaks for the American Jewish community to the U.S. government.  It is not a marginal group that has been denounced by all mainstream American Jewish organizations and leaders, like the Jewish Defense League, whose leader, Irving Rubin, was arrested for alleged conspiracy two years ago, and who then died under suspicious circumstances in prison. Nor are AIPAC's leaders like Jonathan Pollard, a low-ranking government employee without connections to the rich and powerful, who acted entirely on his own to provide Israel with intelligence about terrorist organizations and hostile Arab regimes.

By contrast, AIPAC and its executives are perceived to be at the center of the American Jewish "establishment," the "organized American Jewish community." If AIPAC is discredited in the eyes of the American public as a nest of spies, then the loyalty of every single American Jew will be put in question. In addition, there are indications that AIPAC is not the sole, perhaps not even the main, target of the FBI's investigation. Speaking off the record,
FBI "sources" have suggested to reporters at the Los Angeles Times and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that high-ranking Jewish officials of the U.S. government, especially the so-called "neoconservatives" in the Department of Defense, are in the FBI's counterintelligence crosshairs as well.  One such "neocon," Douglas Feith, heads the office at the Pentagon at which the alleged spy Larry Franklin worked. Feith's name, along with that of former Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, has figured prominently in the FBI's off-the-record "backgrounders" to journalists. Our surmise that the Jewish officials in the Department of Defense who supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq are "persons of interest" to the FBI has been confirmed by anonymous sources at the Pentagon, who have told reporters that internal disputes within the U.S. intelligence community about the accuracy of the United States' prewar intelligence about Iraq are the real motives behind the investigation of Larry Franklin and AIPAC.But it is Israel itself that is probably the FBI investigators' primary target. The anonymous FBI 'sources," speaking to LA Times and New York Times reporters, have claimed that Israel runs a larger espionage operation in, and against, the United States than any other foreign country except Russia. This allegation has been vehemently denied by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who says that Israel has not spied on the United States since the Pollard affair in 1985.

What will the AIPAC case mean for Israel? AIPAC has been the main advocate for Israel's interests with Congress and successive administrations in Washington for more than a generation. If Israel's principal American advocates in Washington are branded as Israeli spies, American friendship with Israel will be severely strained. And it is by no means certain that Israel and her six million Jewish inhabitants, surrounded by far more numerous enemies baying for their blood, can survive without at least one powerful friend somewhere in the world. And what does the FBI's AIPAC probe mean for the United States? Clearly the four year investigation of one of America's closest allies in the war on terrorism and its American supporters must have consumed millions of dollars, and hundreds of hours of time put in by highly trained agents, that could have been better spent in fighting the war on terrorism.

Does America have anything to lose as a result of the AIPAC investigation?
Potentially, a great deal. Far from being sympathetic to the terrorists who have attacked American civilians and soldiers over the past four years and have killed over four thousand Americans, Israel has provided the United States with massive assistance in fighting them. This assistance has included a constant flow of information gathered by Israeli intelligence to the United States, the training of American soldiers by their very experienced Israeli counterparts in counter-terrorist and counterinsurgency tactics, and logistical support for our troops in Iraq. The United States military, according to many well-informed sources, quietly and without fanfare maintains supply bases in Israel for the war in Iraq and to meet other possible security threats in the region. American and Israeli forces have conducted joint maneuvers along Israel's Mediterranean coast.  Israeli engineers have developed much of the American military's cutting-edge weapons technology in recent years. A highly publicized show trial focused on supposed espionage by a loyal and very helpful ally of the United States would put this military and intelligence cooperation, and with it the national security of the United States, in the gravest jeopardy. Are the accusations against Larry Franklin and the two AIPAC officials true
? Does AIPAC engage in espionage against the United States? Does Israel?

What are the motives behind the investigation? Who is spearheading it? Have enemy agents infiltrated the FBI itself? Are certain officials in the FBI and other U.S. agencies anti-Semitic? Stay tuned!

WITH GEORGE BUSH AS A FRIEND . . .

[It is with heavy heart that it has become necessary to document the actions of a President we had supported and believed in. His actions are a betrayal of our most loyal ally and are endangering the security of the state of Israel.]

Many believe the often repeated assertion that George Bush is giving one-sided support for Israel and that this policy is harming U.S. relations with the Arabs. There are two things wrong with that belief. First, it totally ignores Israel’s loyal support for America and its huge contribution to our security over the decades. That issue will be examined in greater detail in a subsequent column. The second fallacy is that George Bush is a true friend of Israel in the first place.

George Bush's 'Roadmap' for Israel and the Palestinians is jointly sponsored by the so-called ' Quartet,' composed of the United States, Russia, Europe, and the U.N. These last three are all hostile to both America and Israel and biased in favor of the Palestinian Arabs. America would never allow these three to influence our decisions about our own national security. Yet Bush has invited them to influence Israel’s decisions about its own national security.

Bush is intent on creating a second Palestinian Arab state inside Israel’s heartland, even though Jordan has been a Palestinian state for sixty years. Israel is trying its best to accommodate this ill-conceived idea, but has raised 14 security issues that need to be resolved before its implementation. Bush has refused to accommodate any of Israel’s 14 security concerns. Meanwhile, he is pressing Israel to carry out the ethnic cleansing of Jews from parts of their ancient homeland, all of them within the area designated by the League of Nations eighty-three years ago as a national home for the Jewish people. His double standard requires the expulsion of Jews from historically Jewish areas because they are claimed by Arabs, while allowing Arabs to live anywhere, including inside Israel. Nowhere else in the world is such ethnic cleansing tolerated. The U.S. even went to war in Bosnia and Kosovo to oppose alleged ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs.

Bush is trying to push Israel back to the highly vulnerable "Auschwitz borders" (so named by Abba Eban) of 1949, within which Israel was only 9 miles wide at its densely populated middle, and Jerusalem was split in two by barbed wire. He has totally ignored the recommendations of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, submitted to President Lyndon Johnson following the Six-Day War in 1967, that Israel's minimum security needs required that it permanently retain control of Gaza and the high ground in the West Bank--even though modern weapons now make Israel's 1949 armistice lines even more vulnerable than they were in 1967, when Nasser attempted to wipe Israel off the map. The planned expulsion of many thousands of Jews from Gaza and Samaria in response to U.S. pressure will further traumatize and demoralize the Israeli people, and in addition devastate their economy, since the immense relocation costs will be borne entirely by Israel. The U.S. government has not offered to help pay even a cent of these costs. This unilateral withdrawal and forced relocation of civilians, euphemistically called a "disengagement," will demonstrate that after two thousand years of exile, homelessness, and persecution Jews are still not secure even within their biblical homeland, thanks to their "friend" George Bush. Arabs can have 5 million square miles and 22 countries, but Israel is denied security within less than 0.2% of that vast territory. Mahmoud Abbas refuses to disarm and dismantle the terrorist groups and demands extensive Israeli concessions in return for only a vague promise of something called "calm" until the end of 2005—not even a cease-fire or "truce," as these temporary, informal arrangements are traditionally called. Bush has not objected to this one-sided proposal, and he offers no U.S. security guarantee even if Israel yields to all demands.

Bush has ignored a ten- year-old Congressional mandate, the will of most Americans, and the urging of former Secretary of State George Schultz that the U.S., after 55 years of delay, at long last move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, even though he promised during the 2000 election campaign to fulfill this American commitment. Bush’s continued refusal sends a signal that Israel’s standing with his administration is inferior to that of the Arabs, and that he can be pressured to break his promises to Israel.

Bush earlier warned Israel not to harm or expel terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. This allowed Arafat to continue terror operations from Ramallah until his death, at a cost of a thousand Jewish lives. U.S aid to the Palestinians Authority, through so-called "non-governmental organizations" (or NGO’s) that it controls, continued throughout the terrorist "intifada" directed by Arafat from September 2000 until his death. Bush has now doubled U.S. aid to the PA, including training of the Palestinian 'security' forces by the CIA, despite the absence of any undertaking by the PA’s post-Arafat leadership to disband and disarm the terrorist organizations, or any serious plan to end the pervasive corruption within its own ranks. Bush’s supposed "support" for Israel includes arming Egypt and Jordan with advanced weapons over Israel’s security objections. Bush’s actions require Israel to divert major resources to protect against a potential attack from two of its "peace partners" (In 1967 Jordan attacked Israel with U.S.-supplied tanks despite U.S. assurances to the contrary and without suffering any U.S. consequences).

Bush ignores Egypt’s long standing incitement of its own people against Israel by means of relentless anti-Semitic propaganda in the government-controlled press, and the constant training and preparations of the Egyptian Army for a possible war against Israel. He also ignores Egypt’s complicity in smuggling weapons via tunnels from Egypt into Gaza to arm the Palestinian terrorists. There has been no demand by the Bush administration that Egypt put a stop to this smuggling, even though it is a flagrant violation of the Israel-Egyptian peace treaty, of which the United States is a guarantor. Nor has Bush acted to oppose the buildup of thousands of offensive missiles and Hizbullah terrorists on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

Bush wants to make the Palestinian state "contiguous," including a corridor linking Gaza and the West Bank. That corridor would cut Israel in half, demonstrating that Arab demands again trump Israel’s security needs and Israel’s rights. Bush has repeatedly pressed Israel to practice restraint in the face of ongoing mass killings of its people while we slowly prepared to attack Iraq. When Israel asked for some extra aid to offset her battered economy Bush indicated general agreement to encourage their further restraint, and then, without warning, cut the grant request by three quarters. Bush is pressing Israel to release large numbers of terrorists as a gesture to the PA even though past experience indicates that many go back to commit more terror.

Bush intervened when pilot-less drones previously sold by Israel to China were returned by the Chinese to Israel for routine maintenance and possible upgrading, in accordance with a contract signed by the two nations more than ten years ago. Without warning, Bush demanded that Israel confiscate the drones, which would violate this long-standing legal contract, even though the equipment utilized no American technology. These peremptory American demands threaten to damage severely Israel’s relationship with China. The Bush administration meddled in this matter even though a previous administration had approved the sale of the drones to China, and even though Israel has sold China no new weapons for many years in deference to American objections. The Bush team has placed Israel in an impossible predicament, forcing it to choose between American and Chinese friendship – even as the U.S. government subsidizes and encourages the sale of American nuclear technology to China by the Westinghouse Corporation, an "American" company wholly owned by the British government! In the absence of any consistent U.S. policy of the withholding militarily sensitive technology from China, this bullying of Israel does nothing to enhance American national security.

The Bush people have also smeared A.I.P.A.C. (the American- Israel Public Affairs Committee) by releasing rumors promising an indictment of A.I.P.A.C. executives for allegedly spying for Israel. Although this investigation has been going on for two years, it has apparently turned up no evidence that A.I.P.A.C leaded U.S. military or intelligence secrets to Israel. Meanwhile Israel’s supporters have become intimidated and reputations have been damaged, with no accountability, no apology and no punishment for those officials who did the smearing. The administration has offered no explanation concerning why the FBI has diverted investigative resources and personnel desperately needed for the war on terrorism to an investigation of a loyal ally in this war, its American supporters, and a patriotic U.S. official (not Jewish) suspected of leaking non –sensitive information to A.I.P.A.C.

The Bush people have pressed Israel to exclude from its purely defensive security fence many Israelis communities outside the 1949 armistice lines, popularly known as the "green line," (which was never an internationally recognized border between Israel and the still-nonexistent Palestinian state), in order to appease Arab opposition to the security barrier. And administration officials have said that the Israeli communities outside the U.S. – approved route of the fence will have to be "dismantled" and "evacuated." Construction of the fence has been slowed to a crawl by American interference, placing hundreds of thousands of Israeli lives at risk. Bush has demanded that Israel move the route of the security fence to about a mile from Israel’s only international civilian airport, at Lod, within easy range of shoulder-fired missiles fired by terrorists from the Arab side of the "green line".

American law provides for extradition of terrorists who kill American citizens while abroad. This law has been enforced in all cases except when Arab terrorists killed American Jews in Israel. Attorney Nathan Lewin testified on Nov. 20, 2002 before the U.S. Senate about the discrimination by Bush’s officials against American Jewish victims of Arab terror. In particular, he described the case of young David Boim, an American citizen killed by Hamas terrorists who were later briefly detained, but soon freed, by the Palestinian Authority. The State Department failed to demand the extradition of Boim’s killers to the U.S., where they could be tried for the murder of an American citizen. Attorney Lewin documented the consistent run-around he received from American officials who refused to follow U.S. extradition laws fairly when American Jews are victims. Arab terrorists have killed dozens of American Jews, but not one killer has been extradited to America for trial by the Bush administration.

Bush’s double-standard policy of demanding Israeli 'restraint' in the face of a massive Palestinian terror offensive over the past four and a half years that has cost Israel over a thousand dead and thousands wounded, many of them hideously maimed and severely disabled for life. Proportionate to its population, Israel has suffered the equivalent of 60,000 American dead and hundreds of thousands badly wounded - many times worse that our own 9/11. Bush showed little appreciation for Israeli sacrifices in blood and economic damage when he forced Israel to "show restraint' in its operations against the Palestinian terrorists, in order to protect American interests in the Arab countries

Israel has been our most loyal and most helpful ally in the war with the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. But when Bush praises and thanks 'coalition' countries for their help, Israel is always missing from the list. Its contributions to the protecting and supplying of American soldiers in Iraq, including the existence of American supply bases in Israel, are being kept secret. This failure to publicly acknowledge Israel’s contributions has helped to foster a widespread misimpression that Israel is a burden and liability to the United States, and that it receives U. S. assistance solely to appease a supposedly all–powerful American Jewish "lobby." In reality, Israel’s assistance to America’s intelligence about the Middle East, to the development of cutting-edge military technology for our armed forces, to the training in anti-terrorist and counterinsurgency warfare for our soldiers in Iraq, and to our military logistics for re-supplying them, have been worth their weight in American gold many times over.

George Bush is actually following a long-standing American practice in that Arab oil distorts our Middle East policy. We sometimes treat our enemies better than our friends, as is the case with back-stabbers France and Saudi Arabia. We should not be surprised when other governments conclude that in some cases it is more profitable to be the enemy of America rather than a friend.

Bertram Cohen and John Landau contributed research and reporting to this article.

REPORT CARD ON AMERICAN JEWISH LEADERSHIP

The collective performance of mainline American Jewish leadership should be evaluated as an incentive toward reforms and improvements. In the absence of any mechanism to accomplish that task, a collective 'report card' based on the experiences and observations of some long time Jewish activists is presented. This evaluation is timely, and even urgent, because Israel is facing extreme danger, anti-Semitism is increasing globally, and we look to our Jewish leaders for competent guidance. The report shows American Jewish leadership, over all and with a few exceptions, has failed badly.This report evaluates the leadership as a whole based on total results since the end of WWII. Some organizations, such as Chabad-Lubavitch with their over 2,000 centers and global outreach, have a remarkable record of accomplishment but they are an exception. Naturally every organization will emphasize their strengths and achievements which they showcase on their web sites. To have a complete picture we must also note the major failures which are not being publicized. We cannot turn back the clock but a thorough self-examination is essential to making necessary improvements. This article is not intended to single out any particular organization for criticism but rather to cite areas where the collective Jewish leadership has failed to respond. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, comprising over 50 organizations, represents the bulk of organized Jewry in America. The issues listed below should be the responsibility of this umbrella organization. These are the findings listing areas of major failure where the need for improvement is painfully evident.

There was never any serious effort to replace the Six Million that perished in the Holocaust. Following WWII there were about 6 million Jews in America. If they had simply increased at a modest 1.5% per year (the same growth rate as Israeli Jews) those 6 million, from 1945 to 2004, would have grown to become 14 million. That is without any additional effort to replace those lost in WWII. From 1945 to 2004 American Jews received three waves of Jewish immigrants: Holocaust survivors, Immigration from Israel and later Jews from the former Soviet Union. During this period the small orthodox community was also growing in size. American Jewry is also more affluent than most Americans. Despite all these advantages we managed, during this time, to actually decline from about 6 million to about 5 million instead of growing to 14 million. (And some of those 5 million are only marginally Jewish at best.) We are therefore missing 9 million American Jews - fifty percent more than Hitler killed! The bulk of American Jewry despite major advantages still shrank from 6 to 5 million. That means that the bulk of American Jewry shrank at a far faster rate, than just 6 to 5, during recent decades reflecting high assimilation and low birth rates. And now with no more waves of Jewish immigration in prospect, what additional shrinkage can we now anticipate? Is there any other ethnic group in America that is voluntarily committing cultural suicide in this manner? And although there is some awareness of this problem there is NO truly serious program now in place to arrest this trend, much less to reverse it. After WWII there were about 12 million Jews surviving in the world with 6 million in the U.S. and 6 million outside the U.S. Most of those Jews outside America were in war-torn Europe, in the former Soviet Union, and in Arab countries, with most of them living under bad conditions. While American Jews, under favorable conditions, were declining from 6 to 5 million these other Jews, under bad conditions, were growing from 6 to 9 million during the same period - a 1.5% rate of annual increase. That is how we now account for the current world Jewish population of 14 million, i.e. 5 million in the U.S. plus 9 million elsewhere, including Israel. It is astonishing to contemplate the contrast. Six million America Jews, with all the advantages decline to 5 million while the other 6 million with all the disadvantages grow by 50% during the same time. Does that suggest that Jews can survive hard times much better than good times? Had American Jews simply