washington | The lobbying assignment has never been clearer for the 5,000 or so activists at this year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference: Stop Hamas and Iran.
Yet when it comes to the details — particularly relating to the Palestinian Authority — the message gets murkier, and reveals differences between Washington’s pro-Israel lobby and the Bush administration.
AIPAC has never been starker in presenting the threat it believes Israel faces. Howard Kohr, the group’s executive director, suggested the threat had never been as dire since the rise of Nazism.
“Evil men and their regimes must not be given time to grow and strengthen,” Kohr said, addressing the assembled delegates as huge images of Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were displayed on video screens in the conference hall. “We must convince our leaders to take all the necessary actions to fundamentally affect the course of history while there is time.”
The message — that Iran must be stopped before it acquires even more destructive capacity — was repeated by speaker after speaker at the conference.
But a tug of war over presidential discretion between Congress and the Bush administration, together with Israel’s own uncertainties three weeks before its election, contributed to mixed messages on the Palestinian Authority as AIPAC activists headed to the Hill in the year’s most impressive lobbying effort.
The activists are touting Senate and House versions of the “Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act” that agree on the broad issue of isolating a Hamas-run Palestinian Authority but differ on key details, especially on whether the president can waive the legislation.
The differences reflect an emerging White House strategy of sustaining aid to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a relative moderate, while isolating Hamas in the wake of the terrorist group’s stunning victory in Jan. 25 Palestinian legislative elections. Abbas remains nominally in power as president, and is tussling with Hamas over his authority. He also retains control over the PLO, the organization that represents Palestinians throughout the world.
The waiver in the Senate version allows President Bush to fund Abbas’ office at Bush’s discretion. The Senate bill leaves in a ban on Palestinian Authority representation in the United States, but removes the House version’s ban on PLO representation.
Both bills radically restructure the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and the United States, setting tough markers for allowing the Palestinian Authority, no matter who’s running it, to reestablish ties with America. It also must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a step further than merely recognizing Israel’s existence.
AIPAC officials and their allies in Congress say the new markers would finally force moderates such as Abbas to confront and defeat extremists, instead of trying to co-opt them — the strategy that allowed Hamas to take power.
The White House is unhappy with the requirements, wanting instead to limit punitive measures to Hamas so that the aid spigot can swiftly be turned on if moderates come to power.
The differences were evident when AIPAC officials openly criticized the White House — a rarity under Bush — saying its insistence that Palestinians go to elections Jan. 25, as Abbas’ Fatah party was imploding, was a colossal mistake.
Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet Prisoner of Zion whose work was cited by Bush in pushing elections forward, agreed. Sharansky, a former Israeli minister who has close ties to AIPAC, chastised the president in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece published Sunday, March 5.
“Despite my faith in ‘democracy,’ I was under no illusion that elections should be held immediately,” Sharansky wrote. “Over the previous decade, Palestinian society had become one of the most poisoned and fanatical on Earth.”
Another complicating factor for AIPAC’s Hamas policy is the uncertainty in the weeks before the Israeli elections, to be held March 28.