In November 2005, the leaders of the Israel Policy Forum met with Rice and pushed her to dismiss Israel’s legitimate security concerns regarding the operation of the Gaza Strip’s border crossing points at Rafah and Karni. Following their advice, Rice aggressively and publicly pressured Israel to make dangerous concessions to the Palestinians that involved Israel’s relinquishment of effective control over its own borders.
After Israel capitulated to Rice and an agreement was reached, Semour Reich, one of the founders of the Israel Policy Forum, crowed, “I have no doubt that we bolstered the secretary of state’s instincts and strengthened her opinion that aggressive American involvement was needed to achieve practical results.”
Ahead of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s scheduled visit with Bush in the summer of 2003, Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote a letter to Bush along with former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger expressing opposition to the security barrier and asking the president to treat Sharon in the same manner he had treated PA leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Weeks later, Bronfman criticized the Palestinians for not limiting their terrorist assaults to Israeli residents of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. In a media interview he said, “If the Palestinian suicide bombers only went to the settlements and told the whole world they were wrong, then the whole world would have had a case against Israel and there would be a two-state solution by now. Instead, they sent them into Israel proper, which is ghastly.”
After Hamas’s electoral victory in January, American Friends of Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom came together in an ad-hoc coalition to shield the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority from Congressional sanctions. Together they worked to sink the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act, which enjoyed overwhelming support in the Congress and the Senate and was backed by AIPAC. The legislation was designed to update U.S. policy toward the PA in the wake of Hamas’s ascendance to power.
The bill called for the immediate cessation not only of direct U.S. aid to the PA but also for the cut-off of U.S. assistance to nongovernmental and UN organizations operating in the PA that had connections to terrorist organizations. The bill defined the PA as a terrorist sanctuary and consequently would have barred the entry of PA officials to and the operation of PA offices in the U.S., and placed travel restrictions on PA and PLO representatives to the UN. The bill also would have prohibited U.S. officials from having any contacts with officials from Hamas, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The bill was approved by an enormous majority in the House of Representatives. Yet, due to the lobbying efforts of this group of Jewish leftists, the Senate version was greatly watered down, and included a presidential waiver that rendered the bill more or less declaratory. Since there was little common ground between the two versions of the bill, the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act was scuttled.
According to the JTA account, Soros would like to institutionalize the ad-hoc coalition’s success in undermining the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act in a new lobby. Its founders all insist that theirs is a pro-Israel group. Yet scrutiny of the groups’ organizational and individual members’ actions leads to the inevitable conclusion that far from acting to promote Israel, this new lobby will work to weaken Israel, to weaken the Israel-American alliance and to strengthen Israel’s enemies. While its Jewish founders insist that they are pro-Israel, the fact of the matter is that they are about to establish an American Jewish anti-Israel lobby.
To its discredit, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government took no steps to stymie the coalition’s machinations against the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act. Indeed, since 2003, Israel’s governments have gone out of their way to applaud these groups. Olmert’s now infamous speech in June 2005 where he said, “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies,” was made at the Israel Policy Forum’s annual dinner.
But for all that, it is not too late to change course. The Jewish American anti-Israel lobby is scheduled to be launched on October 26. Now is the time for the Olmert government to forthrightly announce that the new lobby is not pro-Israel, but rather anti-Israel.