Former AIPAC staffer Keith Weissman, indicted in 2005 under the Espionage Act alongside colleague Steven J. Rosen and Defense Department employee Col. Lawrence Franklin, is desperately worried. In a lengthy, rambling monologue delivered to independent reporter Robert Dreyfuss, Weissman breaks a long silence to declare he’s “concerned that if a confrontation between the United States, Israel, and Iran leads to war, it will be a disaster—one that Weissman fears will be blamed on the American Jews.” It is telling, but unsurprising, that Weissman—through misrepresentations and false dichotomy—exhibits little concern for the broader potential consequence of war. Fortunately, his tired arguments are in a final lap toward oblivion.
AIPAC, in the business of advancing Israeli government policies in the United States ever since its founder left the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1951, has long portrayed itself as the sole distillery of Jewish policy needs to politicians eager to tap the Israel lobby’s seemingly limitless barrels of campaign donations. But AIPAC’s brand has recently sprung a leak as growing numbers of youthful, creative, and noisy organizations challenge its tired claims of representation and even legitimacy. Weissman’s actual concern is that AIPAC and its creaky constellation of affiliates will be blamed if the United States is successfully goaded or tripwired into an unnecessary war with Iran. Accountability has always been anathema for an organization operating more like a foreign intelligence agency than a tax-exempt social-welfare organization.
AIPAC has long brushed its footprints away from trapping pits into which it has successfully lured American taxpayers. The Los Angeles Times has lauded its “donor secrecy,” while Fortune called AIPAC “calculatedly quiet.” One anonymous AIPAC official even confided to The National Journal that “there is no question that we exert a policy impact, but working behind the scenes and taking care not to leave fingerprints, that impact is not always traceable to us.” According to the interview:
The overarching problem is the Israel lobby’s subversion of American governance through election fraud, the evasion of tax regulations and laws regulating foreign lobbies, and the systematized, ongoing infiltration of operatives into key government posts to advance the interests of a foreign state. Unfortunately for AIPAC, the Americans gathering to challenge it cross party lines. Whether they wear American flag pins on their suit lapels or Birkenstocks over wool socks is of ever declining significance. Weissman and his fellow travelers can try to outrun opponents by pulling an old horse’s head from right to left. Weissman clearly wants to tell his side of the story. But Weissman and Rosen will only reemerge as legitimate jockeys astride America’s policy circuits when they again register as AIPAC’s agents of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
