Is the Israel Lobby Running Scared?

Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared?

Judging by the outcome of the Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman affair this
week, it might seem as if the Israeli lobby is fearsome indeed. Seen
more broadly, however, the controversy over Freeman could be the Israel
lobby's Waterloo.

Let's recap. On February 19th, Laura Rozen reported
at ForeignPolicy.com that Freeman had been selected by Admiral Dennis
Blair, the director of national intelligence, to serve in a key post as
chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC, the
official in-house think tank of the intelligence community, takes input
from 16 intelligence agencies and produces what are called "national
intelligence estimates" on crucial topics of the day as guidance for
Washington policymakers. For that job, Freeman boasted a stellar
resume: fluent in Mandarin Chinese, widely experienced in Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia
during the first Gulf War, and an ex-assistant secretary of defense
during the Reagan administration.

A wry, outspoken iconoclast, Freeman had, however, crossed one of
Washington's red lines by virtue of his strong criticism of the
U.S.-Israeli relationship. Over the years, he had, in fact, honed a
critique of Israel that was both eloquent and powerful. Hours after the
Foreign Policy
story was posted, Steve Rosen, a former official of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), launched what would soon become a
veritable barrage of criticism of Freeman on his right-wing blog.

Rosen himself has already been indicted by the Department of Justice in
an espionage scandal over the transfer of classified information to
outside parties involving a colleague at AIPAC, a former official in
Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and an official at the Israeli embassy. His
blog, Obama Mideast Monitor, is hosted by the Middle East Forum website run by Daniel Pipes, a hard-core, pro-Israeli rightist, whose Middle East Quarterly
is, in turn, edited by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute. Over approximately two weeks, Rosen would post 19 pieces on
the Freeman story.

The essence of Rosen's criticism centered on the former ambassador's
strongly worded critique of Israel. (That was no secret. Freeman had
repeatedly denounced many of Israel's policies and Washington's
too-close relationship with Jerusalem. "The brutal oppression of the
Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending," said
Freeman in 2007. "American identification with Israel has become
total.") But Rosen, and those who followed his lead, broadened their
attacks to make unfounded or exaggerated claims, taking quotes and
emails out of context, and accusing Freeman of being a pro-Arab
"lobbyist," of being too closely identified with Saudi Arabia, and of
being cavalier about China's treatment of dissidents. They tried to
paint the sober, conservative former U.S. official as a wild-eyed
radical, an anti-Semite, and a pawn of the Saudi king.

From Rosen's blog, the anti-Freeman vitriol spread to other
right-wing, Zionist, and neoconservative blogs, then to the websites of
neocons mouthpieces like the New Republic, Commentary, National Review, and the Weekly Standard, which referred to Freeman as a "Saudi puppet." From there, it would spread to the Atlantic and then to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, where Gabriel Schoenfeld called Freeman a "China-coddling Israel basher," and the Washington Post, where Jonathan Chait of the New Republiclabeled Freeman a "fanatic."

Before long, staunch partisans for Israel on Capitol Hill were getting
into the act. These would, in the end, include Representative Steve
Israel and Senator Charles Schumer, both New York Democrats; a group of
Republican House members led by John Boehner of Ohio, the minority
leader, and Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican Whip; seven
Republican members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and,
finally, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who engaged in a sharp
exchange with Admiral Blair about Freeman at a Senate hearing.

Though Blair strongly defended Freeman, the two men got no support from
an anxious White House, which took (politely put) a hands-off approach.
Seeing the writing on the wall -- all over the wall, in fact -- Freeman
came to the conclusion that, even if he could withstand the storm, his
ability to do the job had, in effect, already been torpedoed. Whatever
output the National Intelligence Council might produce under his
leadership, as Freeman told me
in an interview, would instantly be attacked. "Anything that it
produced that was politically controversial would immediately be
attributed to me as some sort of political deviant, and be
discredited," he said.

On March 10th, Freeman bowed out, but not with a whimper. In a letter
to friends and colleagues, he launched a defiant, departing
counterstrike that may, in fact, have helped to change the very nature
of Washington politics. "The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the
depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination,
selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the
fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth," wrote
Freeman. "The aim of this lobby is control of the policy process
through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who
dispute the wisdom of its views."

Freeman put it
more metaphorically to me: "It was a nice way of, as the Chinese say,
killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." By destroying his appointment,
Freeman claimed, the Israel lobby hoped to intimidate other critics of
Israel and U.S. Middle East policy who might seek jobs in the Obama
administration.

On Triumphs, Hysterias, and Mobs

It remains to be seen just how many "monkeys" are trembling.
Certainly, the Israel lobby crowed in triumph. Daniel Pipes, for
instance, quickly praised Rosen's role in bringing down Freeman:

"What you may not know is that Steven J. Rosen of the Middle East
Forum was the person who first brought attention to the problematic
nature of Freeman's appointment," wrote Pipes. "Within hours, the word
was out, and three weeks later Freeman has conceded defeat. Only
someone with Steve's stature and credibility could have made this
happen."

The Zionist Organization of America, a far-right advocacy group that
supports Israel, sent out follow-up Action Alerts to its membership,
ringing further alarm bells about Freeman as part of a campaign to
mobilize public opinion and Congress. Behind the scenes, AIPAC quietly
used its considerable clout, especially with friends and allies in the
media. And Chuck Schumer, who had trotted over to the White House to
talk to Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, later said
bluntly:

"Charles Freeman was the wrong guy for this position.
His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of
step with the administration. I repeatedly urged the White House to
reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing."

Numerous reporters, including Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast website and Spencer Ackerman of Firedoglake,
have effectively documented the role of the Israel lobby, including
AIPAC, in sabotaging Freeman's appointment. From their accounts and
others, it seems clear that the lobby left its fingerprints all over
Freeman's National Intelligence Council corpse. (Indeed, Time's Joe Klein described
the attack on Freeman as an "assassination," adding that the term
"lobby" doesn't do justice to the methods of the various lobbying
groups, individuals, and publications: "He was the victim of a mob, not
a lobby. The mob was composed primarily of Jewish neoconservatives.")

On the other hand, the Washington Post, in a near-hysterical editorial,
decided to pretend that the Israel lobby really doesn't exist, accusing
Freeman instead of sending out a "crackpot tirade." Huffed the Post,
"Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described
himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister 'Lobby'... His
statement was a grotesque libel."

The Post's case might have been stronger, had it not, just one day earlier, printed an editorial
in which it called on Attorney General Eric Holder to exonerate Steve
Rosen and drop the espionage case against him. Entitled "Time to Call
It Quits," the editorial said:

"The matter involves Steven J. Rosen and Keith
Weissman, two former officials for the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, or AIPAC... A trial has been scheduled for June in the U.S.
District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Mr. Holder should
pull the plug on this prosecution long before then."

In his interview with me,
Freeman noted the propensity members of the Israel lobby have for
denying the lobby's existence, even while taking credit for having
forced him out and simultaneously claiming that they had nothing to do
with it. "We're now at the ludicrous stage where those who boasted of
having done it and who described how they did it are now denying that
they did it," he said.

Running Scared

The Israel lobby has regularly denied its own existence even as it
has long carried on with its work, in stealth as in the bright
sunlight. In retrospect, however, l'affaire
Freeman may prove a game changer. It has already sparked a new, more
intense mainstream focus on the lobby, one that far surpasses the flap
that began in March, 2006, over the publication of an essay by John
Mearsheimer and Steven Walt in the London Review of Books that was, in 2007, expanded into a book, The Israel Lobby.
In fact, one of the sins committed by Freeman, according to his
critics, is that an organization he headed, the Middle East Policy
Council, published an early version of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis --
which argued that a powerful, pro-Israel coalition exercises undue
influence over American policymakers -- in its journal.

In his blog at Foreign Policy, Walt reacted to Freeman's decision to withdraw by writing:

"For all of you out there who may have questioned
whether there was a powerful 'Israel lobby,' or who admitted that it
existed but didn't think it had much influence, or who thought that the
real problem was some supposedly all-powerful 'Saudi lobby,' think
again."

What the Freeman affair brought was unwanted, often front-page
attention to the lobby. Writers at countless blogs and websites --
including yours truly, at the Dreyfuss Report -- dissected or reported
on the lobby's assault on Freeman, including Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe
at Antiwar.com, Glenn Greenwald in his Salon.com column, M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Peace Forum, and Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss. Far more striking, however, is that for the first time in memory, both the New York Times and the Washington Post
ran page-one stories about the Freeman controversy that specifically
used the phrase "Israel lobby," while detailing the charges and
countercharges that followed upon Freeman's claim that the lobby did
him in.

This new attention to the lobby's work comes at a critical moment, which is why the toppling of Freeman might be its Waterloo.

As a start, right-wing partisans of Israel have grown increasingly
anxious about the direction that President Obama intends to take when
it comes to U.S. policy toward Israel, the Palestinians, Iran, and the
Middle East generally. Despite the way, in the middle of the
presidential campaign last June, Obama recited a pro-Israeli catechism
in a speech at AIPAC's national conference in Washington, they remain
unconvinced that he will prove reliable on their policy concerns. Among
other things, they have long been suspicious of his reputed openness to
Palestinian points of view.

No less important, while the appointments of Hillary Clinton as his
secretary of state and Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff were
reassuring, other appointments were far less so. They were, for
instance, concerned by several of Obama's campaign advisers -- and not
only Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group and former
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who were quietly eased
out of Obamaland early in 2008. An additional source of worry was
Daniel Shapiro and Daniel Kurtzer, both Jewish, who served as Obama's
top Middle East aides during the campaign and were seen as not
sufficiently loyal to the causes favored by hardline, right-wing types.

Since the election, many lobby members have viewed a number of Obama's
top appointments, including Shapiro, who's taken the Middle East
portfolio at the National Security Council, and Kurtzer, who's in line
for a top State Department job, with great unease. Take retired Marine
general and now National Security Advisor James L. Jones, who, like
Brzezinski, is seen as too sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view
and who reputedly wrote a report last year highly critical of Israel's
occupation policies; or consider George Mitchell, the U.S. special
envoy to the Middle East, who is regarded by many pro-Israeli hawks as
far too level-headed and even-handed to be a good mediator; or, to
mention one more appointment, Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell and now a National Security Council official who has, in the past, made comments sharply critical of Israel.

Of all of these figures, Freeman, because of his record of blunt
statements, was the most vulnerable. His appointment looked like
low-hanging fruit when it came to launching a concerted, preemptive
attack on the administration. As it happens, however, this may prove
anything but a moment of strength for the lobby. After all, the recent
three-week Israeli assault on Gaza had already generated a barrage of
headlines and television images that made Israel look like a bully
nation with little regard for Palestinian lives, including those of
women and children. According to polls taken in the wake of Gaza,
growing numbers of Americans, including many in the Jewish community,
have begun to exhibit doubts about Israel's actions, a rare moment when
public opinion has begun to tilt against Israel.

Perhaps most important of all, Israel is about to be run by an
extremist, ultra right-wing government led by Likud Party leader Bibi
Netanyahu, and including the even more extreme party of Avigdor
Lieberman, as well as a host of radical-right religious parties. It's
an ugly coalition that is guaranteed to clash with the priorities of
the Obama White House.

As a result, the arrival of the Netanyahu-Lieberman government is also
guaranteed to prove a crisis moment for the Israel lobby. It will
present an enormous public-relations problem, akin to the one that
faced ad agency Hill & Knowlton during the decades in which it had
to defend Philip Morris, the hated cigarette company that repeatedly
denied the link between its products and cancer. The Israel lobby knows
that it will be difficult to sell cartons of menthol smooth
Netanyahu-Lieberman 100s to American consumers.

Indeed, Freeman told me:

"The only thing I regret is that in my statement I
embraced the term 'Israel lobby.' This isn't really a lobby by, for, or
about Israel. It's really, well, I've decided I'm going to call it from
now on the [Avigdor] Lieberman lobby. It's the very right-wing Likud in
Israel and its fanatic supporters here. And Avigdor Lieberman is really
the guy that they really agree with."

So here's the reality behind the Freeman debacle: Already worried over
Team Obama, suffering the after-effects of the Gaza debacle, and about
to be burdened with the Netanyahu-Lieberman problem, the Israel lobby
is undoubtedly running scared. They succeeded in knocking off Freeman,
but the true test of their strength is yet to come.