Our World: A cautionary tale

May. 4, 2009
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
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Just in time for the annual AIPAC conference, the US Justice Department
announced last week it is dismissing its charges against former AIPAC
staffers Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen. Their prosecution, and what it
exposed about the nature of AIPAC, and the position of Israel, and of
pro-Israel Jews and non-Jews in America must serve as a cautionary tale for
Israel and its American supporters.

A brief summary of the now five-year-old affair is in order. In August 2004,
just as the question of how the Bush administration should contend with
Iran's nuclear weapons program was becoming the issue of the day, CBS news
reported on an "Israeli spy scandal." According to that report, AIPAC
lobbyists were working with a pro-Israel, neo-conservative hawk in the
Pentagon and the Israeli embassy in Washington to try to force the Bush
administration to adopt a more confrontational policy towards Iran due both
to its nuclear weapons development program and to its central role in
fomenting the insurgency in Iraq.

At the time, as a New York Times report noted, the Bush administration had
yet to adopt a clear policy on Iran. As one government source told the
newspaper, "We have an ad hoc policy [on Iran] that we're making up as we go
along." The idea behind the AIPAC spy scandal story then was that these
nefarious pro-Israel forces were being used by Israel to compel the Bush
administration to adopt Jerusalem's preferred policy on Iran.

The truth however, was far less impressive. In the event, Rosen and Weissman
were approached by Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin (who happens to be
Catholic, not Jewish). Franklin asked them to use their connections with the
National Security Council to make then-president George W. Bush aware of
Iran's central role in the insurgency in Iraq and of its swift progress in
its nuclear program. He felt that this information was being obfuscated by
the CIA and the State Department in their briefings to the president.

After that meeting, Franklin was approached by the FBI, which had been
wiretapping his conversations, and was compelled to entrap Rosen and
Weissman in a sting operation. He was given false information relating to a
supposed imminent threat to the lives of Israeli agents operating in Iraqi
Kurdistan which he passed to Weissman and Rosen, who in turn, passed it on
to Naor Gillon then serving at the Israeli embassy. It was this incident
that spurred the CBS report and the accusations that Weissman and Rosen were
Israeli spies.

ROSEN AND WEISSMAN were indicted under the 1918 Espionage Act - a law that
had not been enforced since World War I - and accused of "conspiracy to
communicate national defense information to people not entitled to receive
it." The maximum penalty for this offense is ten years in prison.

Franklin, for his part was sentenced to 12 years in prison for mishandling
classified information. For similar offenses, prominent Democrats like
former national security advisor Sandy Berger and former CIA director John
Deutsch were dispatched with misdemeanor convictions and slaps on their
wrists from friendly prosecutors. Franklin's lawyer is now seeking to
overturn his conviction.

The decision to prosecute Weissman, Rosen and Franklin was clearly
political - and deeply discriminatory. In speaking to Franklin and acting on
the information he provided them, Weissman and Rosen did nothing that
lobbyists and journalists in Washington don't do every day of the year. By
selectively choosing to enforce an arguably defunct law against them - and
against no one else - the FBI and the Justice Department and whatever forces
in the State Department the CIA and elsewhere that supported them made clear
that the US government will treat pro-Israel forces in Washington
differently than everyone else.

This politically motivated prosecution was wildly successful. No, it didn't
lead to Rosen and Weissman being convicted of anything. But that was never
the point. The prosecutors - and those faceless bureaucrats pulling the
strings - managed to drag not only Weissman's and Rosen's names through the
mud for five years, they managed to cast a pall of criminality and treason
on the whole pro-Israel community and the hawks in the Pentagon that tended
to agree with it on matters of national security policy.

And having accomplished this goal, the forces behind the
Rosen-Weissman-Franklin persecutions went on to intimidate AIPAC into firing
Rosen and Weissman. In an act of disgraceful cowardice, AIPAC not only fired
the men, they refused to pay their legal fees and so cast them adrift as
millions of dollars in legal bills began piling up.

AIPAC was not alone in abandoning these men to their fates. Aside from some
lone voices - almost never heard above a whisper - the organized American
Jewish community lost its voice when it came to the AIPAC scandal. While
behind closed doors everyone was quick to shake their heads and acknowledge
the obvious fact that these men were being railroaded in a scandalous abuse
of legal power, in public everyone was mute. There were no angry letters to
the White House and the Attorney General's office demanding an explanation
of how these prosecutions came about. There were no demonstrations outside
the Justice Department demanding that the charges be dismissed. There was no
media campaign to discredit the decision to abuse legal tools to weaken the
pro-Israel community and specifically, to weaken the anti-Iranian hawks in
the US. There was silence.

In a perfectly fair world, where people care about both process and outcome,
the human rights and specifically the first amendment crowd at places like
the American Civil Liberties Union and likeminded institutions, could have
been counted on to stand up and denounce the abuse of executive power that
stood at the heart of the AIPAC scandal. After all, in transferring a
classified memo on Iran to Weissman and Rosen, Franklin was doing something
that the ACLU generally supports.

At one of its major 2008 conferences, for instance, the ACLU invited Daniel
Ellsberg, the former Rand Corporation official who leaked the top secret
Pentagon Papers regarding US involvement in Vietnam to The New York Times in
1971 to serve as it keynote speaker. Both in photocopying the documents and
in transferring them to The New York Times, Ellsberg committed serious
criminal offenses. And yet, because he was doing so to advance the cause of
the anti-war movement, groups like the ACLU worked to discredit his
prosecution. Charges against Ellsberg were dropped in 1973. Ever since, he
has enjoyed hero's status in left-wing, first amendment circles in the US.

But then, apparently, process is not important. For like the organized
American Jewish community, the ACLU, The New York Times, The Washington Post
and all the other outspoken champions of free speech were silent on - if not
supportive of - the Justice Department's case against Franklin and against
Rosen and Weissman.

THIS ENTIRE STORY, in all of its disparate parts, holds some very sad
lessons for supporters of Israel in the US and beyond as well as for the
government of Israel. First, AIPAC's cowardly decision to abandon Weissman
and Rosen and the willingness of the overwhelming majority of the organized
Jewish community to mutely endorse the move exposes an unpleasant truth
about the nature of the American Jewish community. Simply stated, the
majority of American Jews are either indifferent to the treatment of Israel
and its supporters, or are too frightened to express their concerns.

Second, the fact that the AIPAC scandal unfolded during the Bush
administration's tenure shows that even when administrations friendly to
Israel are in office, a persistent, powerful group of bureaucrats in the
federal government remains ready and able to persecute pro-Israel activists
and policymakers. Moreover, members of this group are willing to abuse
executive power to achieve their aim of weakening the standing of both
Israel and its supporters in the US capital.

One of the disturbing aspects of the AIPAC scandal was the readiness of
pro-Palestinian Jewish organizations like the Israel Policy Forum and J
Street to defend the persecution. As James Kirchick from The New Republic
noted over the weekend, M.J. Rosenberg, the Director of Policy Analysis for
the IPF, wrote recently that "as a guy on trial for espionage," Rosen had no
right to point out that Charles Freeman, US President Barack Obama's initial
choice to serve as Director of the National Intelligence Council, had a
record of egregiously anti-Israel behavior and action. What the behavior of
the likes of Rosenberg shows is that anti-Israel forces in the federal
bureaucracy can depend on having an anti-Israel American Jewish amen corner
backing any decision they take to persecute Israel's supporters.

The silence of the human rights and free speech crowd also provides food for
thought. The fourth lesson of the AIPAC affair is that Israel and its
supporters can expect to receive absolutely no backing from this policy
community. As is the case with the US feminist movement's silence on the
plight of women in the Muslim world, and the US human rights community's
silence on the plight of human rights activists in places like Iran and
Syria, Israel can expect that the American Left - both Jewish and
non-Jewish - will be silent about any actions taken against the human rights
of Israelis and the civil rights of Israel's supporters in the US.

It is important that these lessons be properly understood by pro-Israel
activists in the US. And it is imperative that they be internalized by the
Netanyahu government as it crafts its strategy for contending with an openly
hostile Obama administration in the months and years to come.

Many in Jerusalem expressed their disappointment that Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu decided not to travel to Washington this week to
participate in the AIPAC conference but rather delayed his visit to the US
for two weeks to better prepare for his meeting with Obama. But what the
AIPAC scandal shows is that it may be advantageous that Netanyahu's first
visit to Washington as premier not be conducted as part of the AIPAC
conference.

The weaknesses of the pro-Israel community - and first and foremost of
AIPAC - which the Rosen-Weissman-Franklin affair exposed show that it is
unwise for Israel to rely on pro-Israel organizations to sell its policies
to the American people and their elected officials. These groups cannot be
trusted to help out in a crisis because they may simply not care that much
about Israel's security or because they are too frightened of being
persecuted to stick their necks out.

Rather than focus his efforts on rallying the likes of AIPAC, Netanyahu
would be better served to bring his message directly to the American people.
Only by garnering wide-scale, popular, grassroots support for a strong
US-Israel alliance will Netanyahu have a chance of maintaining strong ties
with Washington under the Obama administration and beyond.

caroline@carolineglick.com