What’s the point of AIPAC?


March 29, 2017
Sarah Benton


Brave Jews from IfNotNow demonstrate and speak out outside the AIPAC conference, Washington DC, March 26, 2017. Photo from Twitter

AIPAC Reflects Heroism Of Jewish Power — And Its Perils

By Peter Beinart, Forward
March 28, 2017

It’s fitting that the AIPAC Policy Conference, which convened this week in Washington, falls every year at around the same time as the holiday of Purim. Because the two have a lot in common.

On Purim, Jews read the Book of Esther, which tells the story of a Jew who unexpectedly gains influence with a mighty king. She learns that a wicked man named Haman threatens her people with destruction. Since her status may afford her some protection, she has the option to remain silent. But she does not. She uses her power to foil the wicked man’s plot and save her people.

That’s also the story of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. American Jews are Esther. They have won influence with the most powerful government on earth. They could keep their heads down, focusing only on preserving their own safety and privilege. But wicked men threaten other Jews — the Jews of Israel — with destruction. So America’s Esthers, via AIPAC, use their influence to ensure Israel’s survival. Thus, American Jews transform their power into heroism.

It’s a particularly compelling narrative for American Jews old enough to remember a time when their community did not wield so much power and did not act so heroically in the face of Jewish destruction. If you’re a 70-year-old old at AIPAC, your parents were middle-aged when Hitler ruled Germany. Back then, American Jewish organizations did not summon half the members of Congress to conferences where they dined on kosher food and proclaimed their solidarity with the Jewish people. In the 1930s and ’40s, American Jews were, by today’s standards, culturally marginal and politically timid. They lacked both the power and the will to behave like Esther.

AIPAC affords their children and grandchildren the chance to redeem that failure. “If we had AIPAC in the ‘30s and ‘40s, we would have saved millions of Jews,” declared David Steiner, AIPAC president, in 1991. “But Jews were afraid to open their mouths. They didn’t know how.”

Queen-Esther-with-Mordechai
Mordechai tells a horrified Queen Esther that she must speak out against Haman’s decree announcing the planned genocide of Esther’s people in Persia. Mosaic by Lilian Broca, 2005.

There’s another, less obvious parallel between the AIPAC Policy Conference and Purim. In one of the Book of Esther’s most remarkable moments, Mordechai — Esther’s surrogate father, who faces death for refusing to bow down to Haman — warns his daughter against believing that by remaining silent she can save herself. Don’t think that you will escape just because you are in the king’s house, Mordechai instructs. You and your father’s house will be destroyed, too.

There are two ways to read Mordechai’s warning. Neither the King nor Haman know that Esther is a Jew. Mordechai may be suggesting that if she remains silent, Haman will eventually discover her identity and murder her, too. Or, less obviously, perhaps Mordechai is suggesting that if Esther remains silent, and abandons her people, she and her father’s house will be destroyed not through genocide but through assimilation. Esther, after all, has already taken the name of a Persian goddess, Ishtar. And she has married a Persian man.

The Jews of AIPAC know there are many intermarried American Jews with names like Mary and Christopher. And they worry almost as much about their assimilation as they worry about Israel’s destruction. AIPAC offers an answer to that too. Like Mordechai speaking to Esther, it tells American Jews that by protecting the Jewish people, they will also secure their own survival. Why remain Jewish in the highly assimilated America of 2017? Because Israel needs you, and by safeguarding it, you can be a hero.

At the end of the Book of Esther’s seventh chapter, Haman is hanged. But the story doesn’t end. With the King’s blessing, the Jews take revenge, killing 75,000 of Haman’s people.

Many rabbinic commentators justify this as self-defence. But Haman is already dead and the Jews now enjoy the King’s protection. As Rabbi Jill Jacobs has noted, the text offers no evidence that with the political situation turned upside down, Haman’s people still represent a threat. Moreover, the Jews are instructed to kill not only men but also “little ones and women.”

As if to reinforce the message, Jews on the Shabbat before Purim read a section from the book of Samuel in which King Saul is commanded to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling” of the Amalakites, from whom Haman’s people descend.

The Book of Esther, in other words, imagines power not only as necessary, but also as perilous. It can be used heroically, and it can be used horrifically. It can guarantee Jewish survival and it can threaten the survival of others. It is a blessing and a responsibility and a danger.

AIPAC, by contrast, does not wrestle with Jewish power. It celebrates it to the point of intoxication. At its conference this week in Washington, it encourages Jews to drink it in until they cannot distinguish between 1938 and 2017, between the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the dismantling of a settlement in the West Bank, between our right to exist and our right to oppress.

Peter Beinart is a Forward senior columnist and contributing editor. Listen to Fault Lines, his podcast with Daniel Gordis, available here and on iTunes.



IfNotNow protesters outside the 2017 AIPAC policy conference in Washington, D.C. Photo by Ron Kampeas

Far-left Jews protest outside AIPAC conference

Clashes erupt between anti-settlement group and activists from far-right JDL, who hold a counter-demonstration

By JTA  and Times of Israel staff
March 26, 2017

Several hundred protesters coordinated by IfNotNow, a Jewish anti-establishment group, spent hours dancing and chanting outside AIPAC’s annual policy conference Sunday.

Their placards and chants targeted the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for what the protesters said was its backing of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and for not speaking out robustly against President Donald Trump.

Protesters bore a banner saying, “Jews won’t be free until Palestinians are, reject AIPAC, reject occupation.”

Police allowed the protesters to reach the Washington Convention Center’s glass doors. Some AIPAC activists stopped and took pictures of the protesters, as the protesters looked back, some waving and grinning.

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“How can we have a sustained Jewish community in this country and a democratic Jewish community in Israel” as long as an occupation persists, said Jeremy Zelinger, one of the protesters. “AIPAC does not represent us.”

AIPAC does not formally back Israel’s presence in the West Bank and favours a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, albeit in relatively muted tones. It also blames the Palestinians entirely for the absence of peace talks and refrains from criticizing Israeli policies, including its settlement building.


Anti-settlement demonstrators hold placards and protest in front of Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, on March 26, 2017, during the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference. Photo by Andrew Biraj/AFP

Another theme was AIPAC’s supposed failure to confront the Trump administration on a range of other issues, including its restrictive policies on immigrants and refugees. AIPAC has rarely if ever pronounced on any US government’s policy not having to do with Israel or its interests.

Several protesters bore placards imprinted with the image of Dona Gracia Nasi, the 16th-century Jewish entrepreneur, who used her wealth to rescue Jews fleeing the inquisition. “Reclaim, reimagine, resist,” the posters said.


Police rescue an anti-AIPAC protester during attacks from the Jewish Defence League, March 26, 2017. Photo by Andrew Biraj/AFP

A dozen protesters carrying flags of the Jewish Defence League occasionally clashed with the left-wing demonstrators in at-times-violent altercations, prompting police intervention.


See this thug from the Jewish Defence League beating up a woman in the video below, during the AIPAC Policy Conference. Photo by Andrew Biraj/AFP

Pictures from the event also showed JDL activists stomping on a Palestinian flag. The group was founded by the late far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocated for a Greater Israel and for expelling Palestinians from the West Bank.

AIPAC has drawn 18,000 activists to its policy conference this year, the largest ever. The theme is bipartisan support for Israel, and speakers include Vice President Mike Pence and both parties’ congressional leaders.

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